MARTINE POPPE
The Weight of Water
05.03 - 18.04.26
ISCA gallery is delighted to present The Weight of Water, a solo exhibition by Martine Poppe featuring a new series of paintings exploring water as a central motif.
Water is never neutral. It gathers, presses, and exceeds its edges. It holds memory and reshapes what contains it. In The Weight of Water, Martine Poppe approaches water as both subject and structure - shifting, unstable, reorganising ground, perception, and scale.
The paintings trace movement through landscape: roads travelled, places remembered, time compressed into terrain. As the exhibition unfolds, water gradually dominates the canvas. Human presence is implied only through absence: droplets on a windshield give way to lake reflections that unsettle orientation. In the final works, depth collapses into surface with waves filling the canvas and land reduced to a narrow strip.
Painted in a single layer on translucent sailcloth, the works merge surface and depth. Pale colours and receding horizons reflect a landscape increasingly experienced through screens. Up close, the images dissolve into light and brushwork; at a distance, they come into focus.
The exhibition resonates with historical depictions of water, from Klimt’s lakes and Monet’s ponds to Hiroshi Yoshida’s coastal views and Scandinavian seascapes, while echoing contemporary literary reflections on rising waters and ecological fragility in Frederick Turner, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Iida Turpeinen. Together, the works reflect on perception, precarity, and the shifting ground between lived experience and its afterimage.
Martine Poppe (b. 1988, Norway) lives and works in London and Oslo, and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art BA and MFA in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Poppe's works are developed from the fluidity between the different materials she employs, negotiating the boundaries between abstraction and representation.
Recent solo exhibitions include East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2025); The Earth in Search of Magic Tidings, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Nevlunghavn, Norway (2023); Peering at the Edge of Daydreams, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); Pause, COUNTY, Palm Beach, Florida, USA (2021); A Piece of Me, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2021); To Be Announced, Buer Gallery, Oslo, Norway (2021); Zima Blue, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2020); Waiting for Y, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2019); Portraits of Trees, Trafo Kunsthall, Asker, Norway (2018–2019).
Poppe has received numerous esteemed grants and awards, including grants from The Association of Norwegian Visual Artists in 2025, Ingrid Lindbäck Langaards Stiftelse in 2021 and 2022, the Young Artist Grant from the Norwegian Arts Council (2017), and the Juvenarte Prize in Norway (2010 and 2011). She was also shortlisted for the East London Painting Prize in 2015. Collections that feature Poppe’s work include the UK Government Art Collection (UK), KODE Museums (Norway), the Saatchi Collection (UK).
LIST OF WORKS