Summer in the City, 2019 Painting

Natalia Rose (born 1953) creates paintings, drawings and conceptual artworks. Rose absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into a daily practice through the use of abstractions. A key element of her work is the absence of clear cut references. By challenging the conventional separation between the realm of memory and the realm of experience her work generates diverse meanings. Associations and interpretations collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image. Her work radiates latent power and force, maybe even violence. Disconcerting beauty emerges. Playing with sign processes she seduces the viewer to enter a world of ongoing equilibrium and an interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. Colorful lines and long lines of text populate Natalia Rose's canvases. She explores identity and exoticization of the stranger. The Russian-born artist, who is living and working in Denmark, draws from historical and cultural imagery to create a visual map of identity—an idenity that mingles Eastern and Western beauty ideals and mythologies. Tensions between the varying cultures emerge in the juxtaposition of Danish and Russian worlds, as well as in the celebration and antagonization of the Eastern and Western ideas of beauty and cartoons. Her works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By emphasising aesthetics, she tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces... Rose's primary interest is in pictorial phenomena: the illusion of a three-dimensional space, composition, and the optical effects of color. “It is not the form that dictates color, but the color that brings out the form,” the famous American painter Hans Hofmann said in the 1950s. Her paintings pursue the exploration og the relativity of color, developing technique by which warm and cool colors interact to produce effects of movement, space and depth. Natalia Rose finds it boring, when painting seems to be all too well planned.