Elisa Braem. We Meet in the Night

“We Meet in the Night” invites us to enter into the sculptural world of Elisa Braem, characterised by experimentation with clay and glaze, combined in this project with wood and metal. Her work with these materials includes animal, botanical and human shapes, which co-exist with natural and architectural features, a symbiosis that refers to a human approximation to our surroundings.

With a practice deeply bound to philosophy and language drawing from poetry, along with artistic references from a variety of eras, Braem is interested in those coalescing spaces and features that bring us together beneath the very same sky. The night acts as a meeting place, its darkness transporting us to a state of nature that is paradoxically more human, open to transformation and to a wild, permeable consciousness.

The sculptures in the exhibition are presented as extensions of this very consciousness, expressing the artist’s interest in universal entities like the sky, nature and light. With her practice, Braem enlivens a dialogue between human fascination for the universe, the importance of penumbra in painting and the fragmentation of a territory subject to the human gaze, shifting these subject areas over to her material work. These observations are codified into figures that bring the earthly domain closer to the universal, with shapes similar to birds, mountains or the infinity symbol.

Braem’s gaze also impacts the pictorial and philosophical tradition of landscape. The work with clay brings home the notion that the material comes from specific sites—the mountain, sediments, earth—and to a certain degree returns to them. Aware of how the human gaze over the land blurs the frontiers between culture and nature, Braem does not create works about the landscape, working instead on the process of becoming the landscape.

This sense of construction and transformation accompanies the artist in the conception of works, as well as in their production. Thought flows between reading and drawing, between writing and ceramics, between concept and gesture. Clay is not just a material but a sedimentary metaphor: a register of accumulated time, of decisions and indecisions, of interacting forces. A contemplative attitude that binds artistic practice to a way of inhabiting the world.

 

Elisa Braem (Ostend, 1991) holds a degree in Sculpture (2015) from the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, Belgium, where she also earned a Master’s degree in Sculpture (2016). She also completed postgraduate studies in Cultural Theory and Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London (2016). The relationship with the environment and the sedimentary nature of clay play a key role in the conceptualization of her work and function as an analogy for understanding the procedural condition of all cultural manifestations and for exploring the relationships between space and time.

She has exhibited in various international venues, with solo exhibitions at Galeria Fermay, Palma (2023); TACA, Palma (2022); and Addaya Centre d’Art Contemporani, Palma (2018–2019). She has participated in various group exhibitions at events and venues such as ARCOmadrid with Galeria Fermay, Palma (2024); the International Ceramics Biennial of Manises, Valencia (2020); SWAB Art Fair, Barcelona (2019); Hangar – Centro de Investigação Artística, Lisbon (2019); and the Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels (2017).

Braem has been awarded various artist’s residencies, including from Cerámica Suro, Guadalajara (Mexico, 2023); the Guldagergaard – International Ceramic Research Centre (Denmark, 2021); and Hangar Lisboa (Portugal, 2019). She is also a recipient of the Archie Gittes – Casal Balaguer Award, Palma (2017) and the Sculpture Prize from the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp (2017), and she was a finalist for the illy SustainArt Award at ARCOmadrid 2024.