Martha Skou | Horizon Beyond
Bricks Gallery is pleased to present Horizon Beyond, a solo exhibition by Martha Skou, with an opening reception on Friday, August 14, from 5-8 PM. This marks Skou’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring framed textile works in various sizes alongside two large-scale sculptures.
Presented concurrently with her first institutional solo exhibition at Horsens Art Museum, Horizon Beyond serves as a direct continuation of the museum exhibition, further exploring movement, energy, and materiality. For Skou, energetic vibrations are present everywhere around and within us: from the Earth's movement and the flow of the ocean to the energies and moods that occupy our minds. It is these experiences - visible and invisible - that remain at the centre of her practice.
For this exhibition, Skou has created two freestanding textile sculptures that continue her sculptural investigations presented at Horsens Art Museum. While more intimately scaled, the sculptures possess the gradient colour transitions that have become a signature visual element in her practice, embodying ideas of movement, time, and healing energy while demonstrating both the fragility and strength of materials. By stretching soft textiles into tight forms, Skou explores the relationship between softness and structure.
Soft pastel colours run through majority of the works. With their slow transitions from one shade to another, they signify a calm, healing energy, allowing space for stillness and sensing, while also welcoming curiosity. The works explore softness as a form of strength, suggesting that attention and presence can themselves become a form of resistance to the pace of contemporary life.
Each piece holds traces of the artist’s time and care. By etching fibres out of the textile, Skou reveals the material’s underlying construction. Through bleaching, dyeing, and various colouring processes, she explores the balance between control and chance, allowing materials and techniques to meet beyond their expected functions. In this process, the textile becomes a reflection of human experience: we add and take away, receive and pass on, as we are continuously shaped through our encounters with the world.
Martha Skou (b. 1982) is a Danish interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Copenhagen. She holds an MFA in Visual Communication from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, completed in 2014. Among her recent exhibitions are Format 3 at KANAL-Centre Pompidou (Brussels, BE, 2023), Connect Me at Trapholt– museum of modern art, craft and design (Kolding, DK, 2023), and Disharmony of Spheres at Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen, DK, 2021), all in collaboration with artist Louise Foo. In spring 2026, Horsens Art Museum presented Martha Skou's first institutional solo exhibition.
The opening reception is sponsored by Nørrebrew, offering organic beers and non-alcoholic drinks.
