Three-dimensional drawings from Klara Brynge

The curves of the human body resemble the relief of a landscape. Really. The gorges and rocks are like old wrinkled skin, and the hills ending at the horizon are like chubby roundness, the first associations that come to mind. But not only that. When you strike a silver sheet with your fist, the knuckles also create a relief, visible as a landscape. It changes as you travel – from the train window, the plains are replaced by hills, or swamps covered with bushes and rushes if the tracks lead to St Petersburg, or neatly planted spruce trees if you are heading towards Munich. Glaciers, probably if you’re heading north – when you get off at the last point, where it’s only a sledge.

Klara Brynge (Sweden) shapes the thin silver sheets with hammer and fist like the crust of the earth: abstract curves and bumps create abstract landscapes, and the shine of the silver reminds us of fields covered with snow and ice, on which witches’ fat glistens (do the Nordic countries have a version of the Lithuanian version of the glistening of the snow ?). Silver, matt, and shimmering, it resembles both a snow-covered seashore and a frozen waterfall, where the sound of falling water is still predictable under the ice. And stalactite or stalagmite caves (like Hagrid, I have never made a distinction between the two – no matter how many times I read about one or the other, the memory lasts no longer than the reading). And the salt mines, where salt icicles hang from the ceiling. Fire, the blacksmith’s hammer, and human fists, knuckles, and palms in silver form abstract icy landscapes that make you feel like Captain Hater as you travel through them with your eyes. Who was drawn north all the time.

The artist says :

When I move in a landscape it changes in a flow of images and forms. I make three-dimensional drawings with smithing methods in metal; reliefs, lines, and repetitions from landscapes on surfaces are ripped or stretched out. With blows from a hammer and punches shapes grow as the plasticity of the material allows it to move.