Mette Tommerup, born in Denmark and living in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood for over 20 years, creates large‑scale immersive works that blend performance, landscape, abstract painting and site‑specific installation. Her practice centers on material transformation, treating painting as an evolving encounter with elemental forces rather than a finished object. The process is highly physical, often involving the dragging of canvases across sand, rock, water or other terrain, and is described as an embodied and spiritual act that collaborates with nature. Tommerup’s approach references postwar abstraction and the Color Field movement of the 1950s and 1960s while extending beyond those traditions through a focus on elemental conditions, and it aligns with ideas associated with Italian critic Germano Celant, Arte Povera and phenomenology.
For the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art Tommerup presented a series of large stepped pyramids built from canvases arranged in structured compositions that rise in the gallery like geological formations. The three pyramids are colored in magenta, aquamarine, silvery gray and gold and are titled Formed Under Pressure. In the Ocean Contour and Ocean Loop series (2022) she placed blue‑painted canvases in the ocean at low tide, allowing currents, salt and sediment to alter the pigments. Earlier work in the Made By Dusk series (2020) involved exposing gray paintings to the night sky on a studio rooftop as a tribute to the Nordic goddess Freya, with gold elements meant to echo mythic tears. The three pyramids together form a triangular arrangement that links terrestrial and celestial forces and evokes motifs from Scandinavian mythology and ancient stone structures.
Press release issued by Orlando Museum of Art:
https://omart.org/news/facets-of-elemental-surrender/
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