Maria Wæhrens: How can I help you?

April 30 – June 4 2022

Charlotte Fogh Gallery is proud to present the exhibition How can I help you? by the Danish artist Maria Wæhrens. The exhibition is Maria Wæhren’s first solo exhibition at the gallery showing paintings and works on paper that interpret a helping hand coming from an unexpected source.

A helping hand as a physical and symbolic gesture is at the center of the exhibition called How can I help you?. The title came to Maria Wæhrens in a dream in the summer of 2019. In this dream an angel appears asking Wæhrens “Hvad kan jeg hjælpe dig med?” (“How can I help you?”). The untitled works of the exhibition are created intuitively where the artist explore and try to understand the feelings evoked by the encounter with the angel in the dream: What was the angel supposed to help Wæhrens with?

Maria Wæhrens connects the works of the exhibition to the abstract expressionism with a desire to include the viewer in her process of understanding this dream both visually and phenomenologically. Wæhrens translates her lived experiences to artworks that expresses the evanescence of life, but also encourages one to accept a helping hand when it occurs.

Maria Wæhrens (b. 1976) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in 2005 and has since been part of group exhibitions at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, KØN Gender Museum in Aarhus, The Nivaagaard Collection, O – Overgaden, and The Museum of Religious Art in Lemvig. In 2020 Maria Wæhrens showed a comprehensive retrospective exhibition at Vejen Art Museum and was awarded the 3-year grant from The Danish Arts Foundation in 2021. Maria Wæhrens is represented in the collections of The Museum of Religious Art in Lemvig, The Danish Arts Foundation, and the Spar Nord Foundation. Wæhrens lives and works in Copenhagen.

Installation view of Hvad kan jeg hjælpe dig med? (“How can I help you?”) by Maria Wæhrens (2022)