Currents

Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

March 26 - April 30, 2022

*Skogen*, 2021
Oil on canvas
60 x 80 in | 152.4 x 203.2 cm

*Some sweetness or sharpness in the air (After Tarkovsky’s Stalker)*, 2021
Oil on canvas
48 x 64 in | 121.9 x 162.6 cm

*Mornings that remember sunsets*, 2022
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 in | 152.4 x 152.4 cm

*Carmen*, 2022
Oil on canvas
43 x 35 1/2 in | 109.2 x 90.2 cm

The works in the show stem from the artist’s intention to utilize paint’s unique properties to freeze and transform moments of daily life so as to showcase the hidden properties and sensory currents running through their fiber. “I am interested in exploring how a deeper kind of engaged listening can create brief and invisible architecture—the one we can feel but not necessarily see,” Braathen notes of the painting.

Voyaging into both real and psychic wilderness along with the subjects of her paintings, Braathen subverts the traditional figure-ground relationship, questioning the boundaries of sovereign personhood and the living environment.