Mette Homar Ahl
Berlin 11 Sep – 1 Nov 2025
For her latest exhibition at REITER, Danish artist Mette Homar presents a series of new paintings rooted in her enduring relationship with the landscape of Ahl, a coastal stretch on the Djursland peninsula in eastern Jutland. Over the past eight years, the site has become an anchor of Homar’s practice. She returns regularly to walk its paths, to photograph its shifting light and terrain, and to translate these encounters into dynamic painted compositions. This sustained dialogue with Ahl has gradually shaped her work, allowing fragments of the seascape, trees, and shoreline to seep into her previously more abstract language. As these natural elements entered her work, Homar’s connection to the land deepened. Ahl has become a place of belonging—an adopted home that continually nourishes her artistic practice.
Homar follows in the lineage of artists such as Joan Mitchell, who likewise dedicated years to the landscape of Vétheuil, culminating in her 1972 exhibition My Five Years in the Country. While Homar shares Mitchell’s vivid palette and dynamic sense of composition, her working process unfolds at a slower tempo than Mitchell’s vigorous, gestural approach. She works with persistence and precision, layering thick patches of colour that fracture the picture plane and generate a powerful chromatic push-and-pull. The resulting paintings refuse stasis: the eye never quite settles but instead roams across through the composition as though traversing a landscape without a single vantage point.
At the core of this new exhibition, titled Ahl, lies the significance of repetition. Homar paints the same place again and again, yet each work emerges as singular. This sustained act of return echoes the rhythms of life itself: what seems static from afar is, upon closer attention, in constant flux. Seasons shift, light changes, and the artist’s own perceptions evolve, yielding subtle variations in mood, colour, and form. She paints the same place, yet it is never the same landscape. In this way, each painting becomes both record and reflection—part diary, part intimate self-portrait—capturing not only the mutable contours of the land but also of her own shifting inner weather.
– Anaïs Castro, 2025
Homar follows in the lineage of artists such as Joan Mitchell, who likewise dedicated years to the landscape of Vétheuil, culminating in her 1972 exhibition My Five Years in the Country. While Homar shares Mitchell’s vivid palette and dynamic sense of composition, her working process unfolds at a slower tempo than Mitchell’s vigorous, gestural approach. She works with persistence and precision, layering thick patches of colour that fracture the picture plane and generate a powerful chromatic push-and-pull. The resulting paintings refuse stasis: the eye never quite settles but instead roams across through the composition as though traversing a landscape without a single vantage point.
At the core of this new exhibition, titled Ahl, lies the significance of repetition. Homar paints the same place again and again, yet each work emerges as singular. This sustained act of return echoes the rhythms of life itself: what seems static from afar is, upon closer attention, in constant flux. Seasons shift, light changes, and the artist’s own perceptions evolve, yielding subtle variations in mood, colour, and form. She paints the same place, yet it is never the same landscape. In this way, each painting becomes both record and reflection—part diary, part intimate self-portrait—capturing not only the mutable contours of the land but also of her own shifting inner weather.
– Anaïs Castro, 2025
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