Undercurrents
Galleri Maria Friis are pleased to invite you to the opening of Emmarosa Verdoner Liebgen’s solo exhibition Undercurrents – her first solo presentation at the gallery. Liebgen was previously featured in the group exhibition Sitrende in 2024.
Like excavated relics or fragments of forgotten dreams, the exhibition unfolds through a series of paintings and etchings that explore metamorphic states where human and natural forms dissolve into one another. Working figuratively across both mediums, Liebgen’s motifs shift between female figures, sea creatures, and birds: each embodying moments of transition and transformation. Her works traverse liminal spaces: between sleep and wakefulness, life and death, surface and depth: dreamlike layers that flow beneath the visible.
The show feels both archaic and psychologically introspective. The works recall the Symbolist and Surrealist impulse to visualise the unconscious, in some works even Norwegian Romanticism, yet through a contemporary, feminist lens that reclaims myth and metamorphosis as sites of tenderness, grief and instability.
The works move through various symbolic terrain: water, blood, mythological creatures, and the result is haunting, not because it’s dark but because it feels so lived, as if the paintings are remembering a feeling you can’t quite name. Through colour and gesture, they speak from the gut, as if trying to translate a fleeting feeling before it hardens into thought.
Photo: Malle Madsen