Why Don't You Wear a Suit?
(Translated by Adrian Ivers)
It is with great pleasure that we open the gallery doors on April 25 for Peter Ravn’s solo exhibition
"Why Don’t You Wear a Suit?"
The exhibition presents new oil paintings in both large and small formats. With Ravn’s signature painterly virtuosity, it explores existential themes in a time when the very value of human beings is at stake.
Ravn temporarily sends group dynamics out the door in his motifs and zooms in on the individual. In several works, he has removed the man from the equation, man + suit, leaving only the suit behind.
About this, Ravn writes:
“I came across some old photos from the American South where scarecrows, standing far out in the fields, took on a form that frightened and moved me. Something about the tattered clothing blowing in the wind sparked my thoughts. The discarded garments, once part of the fashion of their time, had entered a kind of rural eternity, making them symbols of the forgotten, the useless, the worthless. The clothes used for scarecrows are the ones no one wants to keep. They belong to the lowest caste of discarded clothing. I felt compelled to examine how the suit would fare in that position. To challenge its status and place it on the scarecrow, far from civilisation, out in a desolate ploughed field, where only the crows come. Or high up in the sky, where no one comes at all.
During my process, the United States elected a new president. And when the question of that very part of the equation, I had isolated in my latest works, was raised in the historic meeting in the Oval Office, it made sense to let it serve as the exhibition’s title.” Unsurprisingly, Ravn – the portraitist of the suit – uses the question “Why don’t you wear a suit?” as a commentary on civilisation, where the tensions and blind spots of our time converge in a broader exploration of culture’s obsession with control and conformity.
For Ravn, the classic suit is the uniform of cultural order.
He says, “When Zelensky is urged to wear a suit, he is called to a form of aesthetic order. The suit is a visual assertion, a defence against chaos, and a cultural construction that unites discipline with beauty. Its precise cut straightens the back, defines the shoulders, and narrows the waist. It stages the body with an almost classical sense of proportion—like a sculpture made of fabric."
In his new scarecrow paintings, Ravn has removed the human figure from the equation. However, humans are still very much present in the narrative and in exploring existential questions. In other works in the exhibition, the man, the suit, and the white shirt form a trinity in a series of ambiguous improvisations, all contributing to the conversation about order and chaos.
(Translated by Adrian Ivers)
It is with great pleasure that we open the gallery doors on April 25 for Peter Ravn’s solo exhibition
"Why Don’t You Wear a Suit?"
The exhibition presents new oil paintings in both large and small formats. With Ravn’s signature painterly virtuosity, it explores existential themes in a time when the very value of human beings is at stake.
Ravn temporarily sends group dynamics out the door in his motifs and zooms in on the individual. In several works, he has removed the man from the equation, man + suit, leaving only the suit behind.
About this, Ravn writes:
“I came across some old photos from the American South where scarecrows, standing far out in the fields, took on a form that frightened and moved me. Something about the tattered clothing blowing in the wind sparked my thoughts. The discarded garments, once part of the fashion of their time, had entered a kind of rural eternity, making them symbols of the forgotten, the useless, the worthless. The clothes used for scarecrows are the ones no one wants to keep. They belong to the lowest caste of discarded clothing. I felt compelled to examine how the suit would fare in that position. To challenge its status and place it on the scarecrow, far from civilisation, out in a desolate ploughed field, where only the crows come. Or high up in the sky, where no one comes at all.
During my process, the United States elected a new president. And when the question of that very part of the equation, I had isolated in my latest works, was raised in the historic meeting in the Oval Office, it made sense to let it serve as the exhibition’s title.” Unsurprisingly, Ravn – the portraitist of the suit – uses the question “Why don’t you wear a suit?” as a commentary on civilisation, where the tensions and blind spots of our time converge in a broader exploration of culture’s obsession with control and conformity.
For Ravn, the classic suit is the uniform of cultural order.
He says, “When Zelensky is urged to wear a suit, he is called to a form of aesthetic order. The suit is a visual assertion, a defence against chaos, and a cultural construction that unites discipline with beauty. Its precise cut straightens the back, defines the shoulders, and narrows the waist. It stages the body with an almost classical sense of proportion—like a sculpture made of fabric."
In his new scarecrow paintings, Ravn has removed the human figure from the equation. However, humans are still very much present in the narrative and in exploring existential questions. In other works in the exhibition, the man, the suit, and the white shirt form a trinity in a series of ambiguous improvisations, all contributing to the conversation about order and chaos.
