The Brooklyn Rail

The heart of Cathrine Raben Davidsen’s exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary is a painting of a family, one filled with reference to a deeply personal, and deeply human, story of love and grief. Raben Davidsen painted Family (1996) when she was in her mid-twenties and beginning to come to terms with the loss of her father, who died when she was thirteen. In this mournful, enigmatic scene, Raben Davidsen appears as a child on the cusp of puberty. She covers herself with one hand and with the other, holds the ghostly hand of her father lying in his sick bed. His gossamer body almost dissolves into a sea of blue. Other spectral figures appear; one is his girlfriend, who revealed in the media he had died of AIDS-related illness. Raben Davidsen recalls that for years she lost her voice to grief. The searing blue of the canvas is a poignant reference to one of the seven chakra colors which represents the throat and the renewal of her voice through art.

For Danish viewers familiar with Raben Davidsen’s dreamlike paintings, the somber mood of this exhibition will feel unexpected. It is the most comprehensive exhibition of Raben Davidsen’s career to date and the first time she has shown a number of early works that were previously hidden in a studio drawer. 1996 marks an extraordinary year when themes of grief, pain, sexuality, and loss bubbled to the surface for Raben Davidsen. She was working quickly, without judgment. The achingly tender results in ink, charcoal, and pencil speak to a private struggle with grief. Many reference the composition of Family, with a young girl standing on her own or entwined with ghoulish figures. Drawings such as I wanted to tell my Dad and Angel (Me and my Father) (both 1996) are heartbreaking in their representation of loss through the eyes of a child. There are also flickers of a youthful sexual awakening and new awareness of the body. The raw vulnerability of these works evokes the spirit of Tracey Emin and Marlene Dumas, who is a particular hero of Raben Davidsen.

These intimate works are framed by portraits of Raben Davidsen’s parents—her mother shown as a child when she had been left at an orphanage, and her father as an adult in shades of copper (For my Father [1985] [1996] and Portrait of my Mother as a Child [1996])—as well as self-portraits of the artist.

As the exhibition moves forward in time, there is a shift in focus from the individual to the collective and finally, the sublime—though a familiar cast of melancholy figures returns. Raben Davidsen purposefully uses the story of her own family history, not as a cathartic exercise, but a framework through which to explore what happens to grief. How do we go on living? Raben Davidsen sees it as the responsibility of the artist to give voice to human suffering. She is also, determinedly, a painter’s painter. She takes delight in the textures, hues, and marks that embellish her canvases, whose thin layers evoke the Italian frescoes of her formative years studying in Tuscany.

Raben Davidsen takes inspiration from photographs of the Syrian war in a series of haunting paintings showing victims of conflict (Depletion and Grace [both 2016]). Painted on linen, the color drains into the support to leave an eerie residue of this history behind. In Believer (2016), the passport photo of the Boston Marathon bomber comes to the surface, as if through coatings of water. There is something unearthly about these images, which somehow removes us from the horror of their subjects. Raben Davidsen offers a meditative vision of pain and a chance of redemption and healing through art.

At the same time, Raben Davidsen stretches beyond the earthly experience of sorrow. The soaring vistas of “The Dark Night” series (all 2016) are occupied by beings that seem to exist in an otherworldly landscape. There is a sense of transformation from one state to another, of the journey of the soul. The subject of metamorphosis runs throughout, from the transition of puberty to the passage from life to death, profane to celestial. Raben Davidsen also refers to Christian subjects, inspired by her studies in theology. The tangled forms of The Dark Night (I) echo the descent from the cross, while the feet in A New Commandment (2016) recall Jesus’s act of humble washing in the Bible. The recent Debris (2023) removes the human body entirely from a war-torn landscape. Crater Scars (2023) could as easily be a picture of the night sky as a vision of the scarred earth.

Raben Davidsen harnesses the vistas of myth and religion to draw us away from the everyday and towards the universal stories of humanity and beyond. The titular words of Rainer Maria Rilke, “Let everything happen to you,” invites a surrender to the enormity of this human experience, both “beauty and terror.”