Ragna Bley’s large paintings are characterised by organic and fluid forms that leave room for chance and unpredictability. Her art oscillates between the representational and the enigmatic. Distinctly experimental, her work also includes sculptures and performances wherein language and text are important components. Spatiality plays an important role in experiencing Bley’s work. For instance, a series of paintings might be hung on wires, floating back-to-back across the room, creating unique conditions for viewing and experiencing.

Bley paints on the floor of her studio in Oslo, pouring and scraping paint over sail cloth and other materials to create layers of colour. She also works on PVC with thick enamel paint, which instead of absorbing into the surface, takes on a sculptural form. Bley has even sewn pockets onto canvases, filling them with organic materials such as tea leaves, dried raspberries, and turmeric. These works are then placed outdoors, which makes the motifs live based on the forces of the weather. Beyond the vivid and shifting qualities of colour, however, the works are also infused with a variety of references to science fiction, science and art history.

The starting point is often personal and emotional, a process guided by intuition and bodily experience. Through countless sketches, the artist explores forms and constellations to find ambivalent spaces or states. Her paintings give a sense of capturing the image in the slow process of its formation and evolution, like an organism of uncertain status. The organic forms can be seen as a kind of social amoeba, functioning both as a large-scale body and as small individual units, wherein Bley questions the common binary division between individual and group in contemporary society.

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Sweden) lives in Oslo. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Oslo Art Academy (2011) and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2015). Bley has had solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall, Kunstnernes Hus, OSL Contemporary, Kunsthuset Kabuso, and Downs & Ross in New York, as well as at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London. Her work is included in prestigious collections such as Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Kistefos Museum, Nasjonalmuseet, and Astrup Fearnley Museet in Norway, as well as Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, and Statens Konstråd in Sweden.