10 September – 3 October 2026
Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 5-7 PM
As The Light Returns is Jet-te L. Ranning’s first solo exhibition at Galleri Helle Knudsen. Her painting moves in the borderland between the figurative and the abstract. Her works are built up in multiple layers of oil, acrylic, and marble dust, creating a light, almost veil-like transparency.
Text by Torben Weirup (b. 1953), a Danish art critic, author, and art collector:
A painting is like a window. One looks at the surface between the frames and sees out over other landscapes, other people’s conceptions of the world, and the artist’s understanding of life. Regardless of when it was created, a painting can offer a new way of seeing the world, convey experiences, and open up other insights into existence. The view changes, and one can look at the painting and be changed oneself – moved and reflective.
This is true of painting in general, and especially of the paintings of Jet-te L. Ranning. We are observers. Jet-te L. Ranning is an attentive observer. She sees and senses her surroundings, and nature in particular. Nature has been a central motif for her for many years. In Carl Nielsen’s late symphonies, one may feel that one can hear nature bubbling and trickling, changing and moving; down in the woodland, far away by the stream. It can seem as if the composer is describing life itself and the vegetation in nature to tell us that the greatest exists in the smallest. And vice versa. Nature’s cycle of destruction and rebirth in a new form, where the same patterns recur.
The same feeling is present in Jet-te L. Ranning’s images, as they are permeated by a strong sense of nature. When one views her newer paintings in relation to the older ones, it seems as though she is zooming ever closer to the motif. Previously, her paintings could resemble a view through a window onto a garden with birds, bushes, and a gentle breeze in the trees. Now we are closer to the motif. Or perhaps the motif has been enlarged in Jet-te L. Ranning’s cross-sections of the world.
The artist herself explains in an email that the plant motifs in her newer paintings were found along the Tiber in Rome. Unlike weeds in fields and, more often than not, in gardens, they cause hardly any harm there. On the contrary. These unassuming plants testify to indomitability. Like weeds blown over fences, they have spread through the city and along the river, fallen down, and taken root. Unnoticed by many. But not by Jet-te L. Ranning, who sees the greatest in the smallest plants and renders them with the same tenderness that artists throughout history have devoted to exquisite bouquets of flowers. A device Jet-te L. Ranning often employs is to allow, for example, the stem of a weed, together with a few leaves, to become a dominant figure on the picture surface, thereby giving it significance.
Like many other visual artists, Jet-te L. Ranning works in series. Without abandoning her recurring central motif, nature, she explores the possibilities of different views and experiences, as she also does in the later series from Rome. It does, however, seem that with each series she works her way ever further into nature. Not unlike, as suggested, Carl Nielsen’s late symphonies, in which nature seems to dissolve into components that form ever-new constellations, driven by the principle of growth and a striving toward the light. Weeds, too, need light to live, grow, and set seeds that fly onward and take root. It is as if the plants’ natural restlessness – spreading their winged seeds with every gust of wind, as Shelley puts it – is propagated in Jet-te L. Ranning’s paintings, turning them into restless surfaces where the eye is led onward toward new discoveries.
Jet-te L. Ranning’s way of working with transparent layers in her painting seems this time to result in the background becoming more like a wall than a view of the landscape behind the foreground. On what resembles a wall, words and fragments of sentences sometimes appear. Confidenza it says in one place, Italian for trust. Speranza in another, meaning hope. Both trust and hope seem to be prominent moods in Jet-te L. Ranning’s series of paintings, which is additionally part of an exhibition titled As The Light Returns. What could be more hopeful than the return of the light, the rising of the sun, and the fact that everywhere there is a crack where weeds can take root?
Jet-te L. Ranning observes the beauty in what is overlooked and records it in her collage-like paintings, in which the bird is also a recurring figure. Birds have many symbolic meanings. But in the context of Jet-te L. Ranning’s latest paintings, one may hope that they are messengers of … hope.
Just as the weeds are. And just as art is. - Torben Weirup, August 2026
Jet-te L. Ranning (b. 1954) lives and works in Odense, Denmark. She studied at Skolen for Brugskunst, Copenhagen (1975–80), and the School of Visual Arts, New York (1981–83). Her works are represented in, among others, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, ARoS in Aarhus, The Americas Collection in Miami, and The New Carlsberg Foundation. In 2012, she was awarded the Niels Bagge Kunstfonds Honorary Prize at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Galleri Helle Knudsen previously presented works by the artist at the Enter Art Fair in Copenhagen in 2025.
