Born in Denmark and based in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood for over 20 years, Mette Tommerup creates large-scale, immersive works that blur the boundaries between performance, landscape, and abstract painting, as well as site-specific installations. Her practice is anchored in material transformation, in which painting as a discipline does not yield a finished object or product but is an active, evolving encounter with elemental forces. Tommerup approaches art-making as an embodied and spiritual act that relinquishes authorship in favor of collaboration with nature itself.
Tommerup embraces experimentation as an essential part of her work. For her, painting is a continuous act that extends beyond the canvas and studio walls. Her process is highly physical, often involving the intentional dragging of canvases across sand, rock, water, or other terrain. This emphasis on movement, exposure, and material vulnerability connects her work to the legacy of postwar abstraction explored by the Color Field movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Tommerup pushes beyond those traditions by stripping painting down to its elemental condition, allowing the viewer to experience its physicality and conceptual potential. Her work also resonates with the ideas of Italian critic Germano Celant and the philosophies of “Arte Povera” and Phenomenology, as she aims to create a conscious experience of painting that enables a viewer to have a direct relationship with the work and the space it occupies.
Tommerup’s installations often transform entire spaces into immersive environments. For the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, large, stepped pyramids built from canvases carefully arranged in structured compositions rise in the gallery like geological formations or ancient architectural monuments. Recalling the Earth’s geologies beneath them, they stand, imposing, massive, yet elegant. Jewel-toned in magenta, aquamarine, silvery gray, and gold, and faceted by both the painter’s expert hand and the stacked composition that gives them shape, they radiate like gems, diamonds that bear their name well: Formed Under Pressure.
In several of her series, including Ocean Contour, Ocean Loop (2022), Tommerup surrenders her blue-painted canvases to the ocean. Pulling large unstretched paintings into the water at low tide, she allows the currents, ebb and flow, salt, and sediment to alter the original pigments and surfaces. The paintings record this environmental interaction, which becomes central to the artist’s intention and blurs the distinction between what is added and taken away, between creation and erosion.
Influenced by Nordic mythology and storytelling traditions, including the writings of Hans Christian Andersen, Tommerup harnesses the elemental forces that often carry symbolic and mythological dimensions rooted in her Scandinavian heritage. The ultramarine tones on one pyramid recall the icy landscapes of Scandinavia, snow-covered fjords, névés, firns, and glaciers, conjuring visions of ancient myths preserved in ice. In her second pyramid, “Ur,” the primordial state or original life force, often translated as “Fate,” manifests through the magenta color, associated with love, ritual, and divine energy.
The flushed pinks and varied red hues evoke fleshy, sensuous textures and the blush of rose petals. In the third pyramid, the cool tones of silvery grays and warm earthy browns echo the archaeology of ancient stones, runes, pyramids, and temples that punctuate sites of wonder across the world. The gray paintings were part of a series titled Made By Dusk (2020), created on the centennial of women’s right to vote as a tribute to Freya, the Nordic goddess of love. For this work, Tommerup hauled the canvas to the rooftop of her studio and exposed the paintings to the night sky. The gold element, sprinkled throughout this piece and its noble neighbors, echoes Freya’s mythical tears, turned to gold as they fell upon mortal soil.
This trinity of paintings, in their mystical triangular formation, which could be read as a nod to the three triangles of the Valknut, is suspended between terrestrial and celestial forces, linking human experience to larger cosmic systems. They recall both the earth’s ecologies and the ancient carved stones, marked by time immemorial, of civilizations born of ancient knowledge. They have distinct facets, moods, characters, and energies; they become full-fledged awe-inspiring entities. There is something universal and strangely comforting in their presence, as if we had always known them and they were welcoming us home.
