Slow Weather

Gallery Borry presents Slow Weather, Ilse Krohn’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first to bring together a complete year of panels.

The eleven paintings here were begun in January 2025 and finished in April 2026. They were made in the order in which they are hung, which is the only piece of information Krohn is willing to supply about their sequence. She does not date individual works to a month, and she resists any account of the series that treats it as a diary.

What she will discuss is preparation. Each birch panel receives between eight and eleven coats of chalk ground bound in rabbit skin glue, sanded flat between applications, a process that occupies about three weeks before any colour is introduced. The pigment is then floated on in extremely dilute washes and abraded back with wet paper while still soft. The number of passes varies. Slow Weather (Waalhaven), the largest work in the exhibition, carries around forty.

The consequence of this method is that no gesture survives. There is no mark in these paintings that can be attributed to a particular movement of the hand on a particular afternoon. What is visible instead is the residue of several hundred such movements, held in the tooth of a ground that was built specifically to hold it. Krohn has described the panels as instruments rather than images, which sounds evasive and turns out to be literal: the ground is a measuring device and the paint is what it measured.

The titles refer to conditions in the port of Rotterdam, where Krohn has kept a studio since 2011 and where she walks most mornings. They are not descriptions of the works. They are the names of days.

A conversation between the artist and conservator Anneke Ruitenbeek will take place at Hazenstraat on Saturday 29 August at 15:00. Admission is free and no booking is required.