Galleri Nicolai Wallner is pleased to present Ombres, a solo exhibition by Anna Munk.

Munk’s work sits within multiple registers, crossing the historical, exploratory, formal and conceptual. Within her paintings, there can be found traces of the intimate and personal alongside material and theoretical questioning of society’s visual hierarchies. Ombres comprises seven still-life paintings, each simultaneously ephemeral and substantial, with their larger-than-life scale and objects that dissolve into the background.

Each of the seven works uses as its point of departure a historical still-life painting and a colour palette from the iconic Chanel line of eyeshadows, from whence the exhibition and each painting take their names. Powdered marble, rabbit-skin glue, oil paint, wax, eyeshadows, varnish, and the digital archives of national museums all work equally to give a work its form, acting as materials rather than subjects of an image. Like a choreographer, Munk shapes symbols of beauty, and exclusivity into an expression of time, impermanence, and the body.

In the space, Munk’s paintings are engulfing yet restrained. The first work that catches one’s eye upon entry is rendered in all black, with wisps of jute winking through at the edges. Facing this work is another monochrome, limited to tones of grey and white. This work, Gris Paris, holds a looseness and physicality that the works to its left and right, for example, have channelled into precision. With each work, the repeating motifs begin to blur together, bringing Munk’s painterly approach to the fore. After some looking, one might begin to read Munk’s works more as abstract paintings, drawing from them a mood, the pace of movement, or a loosely connected reflection, rather than an image at all.

Munk’s material investigations blend traditional and non-traditional materials often used in intuitive or unlikely combination. In Clair-Obscur, for example, this brings forth unexpected expressions: Oil paint, charcoal, and rabbit-skin glue race each other to dry, betraying the underpainting with glossy stretch-mark like ripples. Glitter can be found in varying degrees, in metallic pigments or tapped onto the high points of a vase, and varnish is used sparingly for its glossy effect, rather than its sealing properties. Precisely highlighting one side of a garlic clove, the glimmer of a silver cup or blending the feathers of a pheasant, Munk mirrors the ritual of contouring and shaping a cheekbone in the mirror, and the meanings embedded in such an act.

While so many gestures in Munk’s practice point to ideas of the body and beauty, the works also hold within them something more cerebral. The ephemerality of these paintings evokes an image as remembered. Memories ride neural pathways, sometimes with connections branching out densely, touching relationships, senses, visuals, and concepts. Others still, with fewer bridges, take concerted effort to bring to mind. Ombres materializes the process of recalling a scene, pulling it through the corridors of other memories, of impressions, and of forgetting, warping the true object and attempting to squeeze it into the present. In Blurry Blue, one of the vessels has been forgotten from the original, or in Brune Fauve the bowl no longer dominates. Blurry Green is recalled in mirrored view, the composition flipped. Still lifes appear as ghosts or mirages, full of holes and glitches.

Dissipating slowly like perfumes, each brushstroke in these works is a flicker or a memory. Ombres embodies tensions and yearning and the passing of time.

Anna Munk (b. 1994, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Painting and Pictorial Practices in 2022, and has exhibited in South Korea, Norway and Germany, with solo exhibitions in Denmark and France.

Watch the interview here.