Pilar Corrias presents Oyster, Ragna Bley’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, comprising a new series of sculptures and large-scale paintings. The exhibition plays with borders and categorisations – where a painting stops, where one environment gives way to another and how we perceive what belongs where.
Bley’s practice incorporates layered painterly techniques. The artist uses spray paint, transparent mediums, marbling, oil and acrylic, creating a contrast of weights across her canvases. In Bley’s paintings, borders are both fixed and porous. Colour seeps into the canvas and spreads, moving from one area into the next, pooling, thinning out and taking hold elsewhere. The shapes in the paintings appear to push towards the edge of the canvas; a straight, constructed limit that the paint can reach but does not cross. Bley paints with her canvases laid flat on the floor, and uses salt, snow and ice in the process of applying paint to the surface. As the ice melts, the final form of the work is determined by time, and a negotiation of chance and control.