Exhibition statement by Maria & Natalia PetschatnikovFor a new exhibition at Albert Contemporary in Odense, we developed a series of paintings that takes Vilhelm Hammershøi’s work as its point of departure.
The conversation began long before the exhibition itself. Shortly after moving to Germany from the United States, where we studied, we encountered Hammershøi’s work at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Since then, we have lived with the catalogue of his works for years, returning to it again and again.
The challenge was to enter into dialogue with another artist without simply borrowing his language. Hammershøi is often described as a painter of silence and contemplation, but we have always sensed something else in his work: a psychological charge, a nervous energy, a feeling that something remains unsaid. Through this project, we wanted to explore what lies behind that silence and how silence itself is perceived today.
The exhibition includes a series of ten paintings based on reproductions from the catalogue of Hammershøi’s works rather than on the paintings themselves. The images are skewed, cropped, folded, enlarged, or focused on details. Sometimes an entire space remains; sometimes only a hand, a chair, or a patch of light is carried through the translation from painting to reproduction and back into painting again.
In our works, we use materials foreign to Hammershøi’s world: acrylic markers in fluorescent colours and sharp, searching lines that resemble doodles or thoughts unfolding on the surface of the canvas. Acrylic and oil paint coexist with large areas of untouched white. The square canvases vary in scale but retain an intentional sense of incompletion, with lines moving across surfaces and interrupting forms.
A group of six miniature paintings on square wooden panels brings the conversation into our own lives in Berlin. During our recent search for a new apartment, we encountered countless empty rooms and transitional spaces that felt reminiscent of Hammershøi’s interiors. Windows, doors, and staircases, together with our own figures quietly observing these spaces, became both a record of our experience and a reference to his paintings.
The exhibition will also include a series of oil monotypes printed on paper stained with acrylic marker lines. These works focus on details from Hammershøi’s paintings, particularly the hands of Ida Hammershøi and Anna Hammershøi, his wife and sister, who were frequent models.
Although Hammershøi is often placed firmly within art history, we continue to see him as deeply contemporary. His paintings contain a psychology and emotional tension that feel remarkably present today.
Through this project, we hope to touch the nerve that we continue to feel beneath the surface of his paintings and to invite viewers into a conversation about the complex nature of silence.
Click here to see the works by Vilhelm Hammershøi, as referenced in the exhibition.