Amalie Gabel’s (b.1992) practice unfolds as both medium and method—a spiral-like investigation where ideas, materials, and motifs return in new forms. Her works revolve around the places where people leave traces: in the home, on the train, in waiting rooms—spaces where intimacy and strangeness coexist. She is drawn to repetition as a way of processing experience and building a visual language in which figures and forms return—familiar, but never identical.
Gabel often works with textile materials: curtains, sailcloth, linen, and polyester. Her paintings extend beyond the traditional canvas, inviting sculptural thinking into the pictorial plane. Through gentle constructions—pleated curtains drawn across a surface, or window-like frames—her work activates the relationship between painting, architecture, and the body. Figuration enters gradually, like an afterimage: breathless, awkward figures in transit, residues of conversations whose words are no longer remembered.
With a focus on public spaces and everyday observations, her paintings reflect a particular kind of loneliness—not as absence, but as something palpably present. They speak of loss—through time, misunderstanding, or death—and the need to pick up the fragments and reassemble them. Not necessarily to repair, but to understand. For Gabel, artistic practice lies precisely in this gesture: how we take things apart, and how we put them back together—visually, linguistically, physically.
Her work draws on both daily life and theoretical frameworks—from Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to panoptic reflections on surveillance and visibility. The gaze, the frame, and the shifting point of view are recurring motifs; her paintings balance the visual and the felt, the spatial and the psychological.
Gabel describes art-making as "stepping up to the podium without your notes"—where awkwardness and vulnerability are not concealed, but embraced. These are paintings that do not strive for perfection, but for precision. Works that feel like pictures on a phone: quick, off-angle, in motion—but deeply and unmistakably material.
Før stormens stilhed, 2025
Glemte sange og en svag mumlen, 2024
Tænkeren, 2024
I knugende hånd, 2024
84 billeder fra sidelinjen, 2025
En hyldest til mine helte, 2025