I Am Fire and Water is the title of Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s largest solo retrospective to date. Which makes perfect sense, because that’s exactly what she is. Reuter Christiansen has set canvases on fire and extinguished patriarchal fantasies with buckets of ice-cold water for six decades now. The first-person point of view is particularly apt: it is Ursula who speaks here, in the artworks, the texts, and the labels on the walls. She speaks with the dignified authority that comes with having been a force of nature for 81 years and counting.
The exhibition at Arken is a tour de force, too. Extending out across seven rooms, it all begins with an incantation. Two brooms form a cross in the air, clearly indicating that we are entering a new world, a lived life seen from a woman’s perspective, brimming with expressive drama and demonic energy. The first room is dominated by a drying rack on which white pieces of fabric with blood-red devil faces have been hung to dry. Underneath the rack is a rather forlorn washtub full of reddish water. The evil could not be washed away, and now it hangs openly on display, fully conjured up with no hope of banishing it. In a painting on the wall behind the drying rack, another beast looks out at us, its animal face red, its body dressed in fur. This is Reuter Christiansen herself, the she-devil who has left behind laundry and gender roles alike to grapple with existence itself.
All this sets the ball rolling in style. In the next room, we find Reuter Christiansen’s signature poppies – a flower whose beauty hides a drug that can stun and kill – this time on a huge glass screen that zigzags through the room. They still resemble gunshot wounds. “Courage,” says a legend written in black letters across the flowers: Take heart, you child of humankind, and dance between life and death like the red female figures painted among the flowers.
A landscape of fallen tree trunks suggests the aftermath of a natural disaster. Perhaps an internal storm surge whose enormous force has smashed the entire forest with its ferocity? Delicately poised among the trunks are fragile glass dishes with plants enclosed within; they seem to lie dormant. We sense that nature is imbued with spirit – that the forest is magical and transformative as in a fairy tale, and that even rootless tree trunks might sprout and become saplings again. Here she is again: the painter, appearing before us like a white ghost on a huge black canvas as she views her work, her acts of destruction and creation, still wielding her palette.
Of course, war is here too: the world war that Reuter Christiansen was born into and all the wars that are ever with us. Arranged on black pedestals are a series of small ceramic ruins surrounded by glass and dedicated to children affected by war. Glass bombs, Reuter Christiansen calls them, small missiles that shatter as soon as they are launched. Behind them is a canvas with other bombs, black and menacing with words of accusation and derision painted upon them. “Shame.” A sticky yellowish mass runs down the canvas: rotten eggs that Reuter Christiansen has thrown at the bombs in contempt.
A recurring feature in the exhibition is a series of black watchtowers that appear in every room. From here, various figures watch us: the Executioner from Reuter Christiansen’s most famous film work, Skarpretteren, 1973; a witness; an eye on a monitor, and several other representatives of the authorities, patriarchy, and death. There is something stunted and amputated about them all. The witness has their eyes shut, a ballerina is missing a leg and can no longer dance, while the executioner seems blind. They may well be monitoring us, but they no longer have any power over us, Reuter Christiansen seems to say. Overall, her exhibition is poised between the cruelty, the hopeless evil in the world, on the one hand, and all things life-giving, hopeful, and budding on the other. Like when a new film piece shows Reuter Christiansen looking out across a misty meadow while a voice whispers: “It is not yet too late.” Not for those who have the courage to dance among the poppies and throw eggs at the bombs, anyway.
The final installation in the show is also the most intense. It’s almost an entire exhibition in its own right. Canvases as tall as human beings stand freely in the room, forming a circle. Here we find an abundance of expressive figures in unstable landscapes, rapid brushstrokes, and a palette that ranges from the earthy to the synthetic. The works vibrate with electric energy. “All the figures are me because I identify with everything I paint,” the artist boldly declares in the accompanying text.
In the circle’s centre, awash in the glow of a spotlight, the artist’s signature white fur coat looms large, standing regally in a black sleigh accompanied by a stuffed eagle. Here we find self-staging and self-aggrandisement to the Nth degree. There is no call for false modesty here. The artist is the natural centre of the world that she has created around herself, and which she generously shares with us in this excellent exhibition. Ursula may have left the building (leaving her coat behind as a substitute), but she remains utterly present through her work, her heart and force resonating throughout it all.
