Becoming Undone

Since Louise Hindgavl’s first exhibition with Hans Alf Gallery, “Fixed Ideas” back in 2017, her career has seen a number of significant highlights. Last year, she was awarded the prestigious ‘Anne Marie Temanyi’ grant of 100.000 DKK (alongside Sophie Dupont and Trine Søndergaard among others), the New Carlsberg Foundation donated six of her works to the renowned Parisian museum ‘Musée des Arts Decorative’, and Hindsgavl made a substantial contribution to the award-winning exhibition “Wunderkammer” at the Esbjerg Museum of Art.

In Hindsgavl’s new exhibition, “Becoming Undone”, concepts such as dissolution, transformation and materialization serve as unifying themes. It is only through transformation, the process by which the existing ceases to be, that something new can emerge. By focusing on the very moment, in which the change occurs, Hindsgavl stresses that dissolution is an inevitable part of all human evolution - an evolution she explores through her new body of work.

On dissolution as a common theme, Hindsgavl says the following: “The caterpillar must perish for the butterfly to emerge. Neither caterpillars nor butterflies are depicted in my works; here it’s individuals, who are subjected to transformation. A transformation that might occur consciously or unconsciously, controlled or uncontrolled. Nevertheless, the individual goes through a transformation from one state to another.”

‘Undone’ describes the current state of the works. Using motifs that convey the process of dissolution, and the sense of chaos that ensues, Hindsgavl seeks to highlight this transitional phase that – although unpredictable and uncomfortable – contains the seed of evolution. It is in fact through this unfamiliar state, where everything is still unfinished and thus possible, that novelty is born.

With her meticulously crafted porcelain figures, Hindsgavl somehow also manages to communicate the untamed and uncivilized. This juxtaposition of both form and content, of expression and narrative, is highly exemplary of her artistic practice; an inherent suspense that becomes visible when disquieting, fable-like scenarios unfold in the innocent, almost decadent porcelain. Through her thematic dark narratives embossed by erotica, humor and ambiguity, Hindsgavl seeks to demonstrate how development goes hand-in-hand with despair, joy with sorrow, and desire with pain. With “Becoming Undone”, Hindsgavl yet again proves, why she is one of the most prominent ceramicists in Denmark.