Ragna Bley

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden) is an artist based in Oslo working with painting, sculpture, text and performance. She explores the oscillation between the familiar and alien, looking to narratives within biology, literature and science-fiction. Bley’s colours vacillate over the surface and seep into the canvas, intermixing like currents and creating infinite possibilities of grouping and regrouping form. Through this process, Bley traverses the relationship between abstraction and representation. She creates layers and transparencies that hint at familiar shapes and organic matter, though the visual associations that arise from Bley’s paintings are completely individual - and may at times resemble forms that are imperceptible to humans. Certain areas of Bley’s canvases are painted, while some are left bare, alluding to the instability of images, and more broadly, to the slippages between our frameworks of understanding.