Artists

Mette Winckelmann

Press release

In the exhibition SLIP, Mette Winckelmann presents a series of new paintings and textile works in which paint, fabric, and composition merge in an exploration of the meaning, history, and potential of materials. The exhibition revolves around a movement – a "slip" – that points to yielding, losing control, and letting something slide, both mentally and concretely, including the bodily and intimate realm. Winckelmann engages with the loss that occurred when painting turned away from narrative, representation, and lived experience in favor of abstraction and formal experimentation in its pure modernist form. In this process, patterns, textiles, and folk art were often marginalized as low-cultural expressions. SLIP revisits this rupture and brings forward changeability, transience, and traces of the body in tactile works, fractures, and juxtapositions of painting and woven surfaces. According to Winckelmann, material carries a kind of embedded memory and can be compared to the body's ability to remember. Textile and its inherent meaning are created through a gaze, a body, an experience, a feeling. In the exhibition, Winckelmann draws on craft traditions rooted in necessity, where sewing and textile work are connected to the handling and utilization of resources, with materials being dissolved and reassembled for new uses. The exhibition moves between the pure and the impure, the controlled and the dissolved. Concepts such as illness, transformation, and change function as metaphors for the ability of both material and body to shift. In the works, this unfolds through patterns and repetition that create movement and continuation without a fixed endpoint. Serial structures and repetition play a central role in the works, pointing to continuous production. Symmetry and framing are challenged and dissolved – the work exists both within and beyond its own boundaries, just as the body is simultaneously a frame, a container, and a point of departure for change. SLIP is an exhibition that moves backward without relinquishing what has already been achieved.