Cathrine Raben Davidsen.
Denmark
Cathrine Raben Davidsen is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen whose practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, textiles, object work and collaborative design. Across nearly three decades, her work has developed a distinct visual language around transformation, memory, mythology, spiritual history and the symbolic systems through which images carry meaning across time.
Raben Davidsen holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and studied at Instituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence and Vrije Akademie in The Hague. Her work is represented in major Danish collections including the National Gallery of Denmark, Trapholt, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Horsens Art Museum, the Museum of Religious Art, the Danish Art Foundation and the New Carlsberg Foundation. She has also created set and costume designs for the Royal Danish Ballet.
Her recent institutional profile has been decisive. In 2022 she became the first recipient of the Beckett Prize, and in 2024 Copenhagen Contemporary presented Let Everything Happen to You, her most comprehensive retrospective exhibition to date, bringing together more than 130 paintings and drawings. The exhibition attracted international coverage including Vogue, and Copenhagen Contemporary has noted that her work is held by collectors including Bruce Springsteen, Liv Tyler and Sofia Coppola. She was appointed Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog in 2015, and her design practice is represented internationally through Nilufar Gallery and The Future Perfect.
For Project Materia, Raben Davidsen brings an artist's language shaped by ritual, transformation and material sensitivity. Her work expands the project beyond formal design, placing matter, myth, image and object in direct conversation with contemporary collectibility.
Works for Materia 2026
Parsifal
Matek™, steel
165 × 120 cm · three-panel folding screen (variable dimensions)
Edition of 18 + 3 AP
Three-panel folding screen — painting, object and architecture in one.
Parsifal 01 is a folding screen composed of collaged Matek panels connected with custom steel hinges, moving between painting, object and architecture — functioning both as image and spatial divider.
The screen is made from Matek, Mater's circular material produced from waste streams including coffee shell waste, sawdust and recycled e-waste plastic. It has a dense, tactile quality — somewhere between stone, terrazzo and industrial composite — while still carrying traces of its organic origins. I am interested in this tension between the manufactured and the deeply physical: industrial yet almost archaeological in appearance.
Working directly with the Matek panels allows the surface to operate simultaneously as image and object. The material already contains a fragmented history of transformation, which becomes central to the logic of collage, layering and the folding structure. The custom steel hinges emphasise its architectural quality and allow the work to continuously shift in space — opening, closing, concealing and revealing.
The title references Parsifal from medieval mythology and opera — the wandering seeker moving between worlds in search of meaning or transformation. I am interested in the folding screen as a threshold object: something that both conceals and reveals, producing shifting perspectives as the viewer moves around it.
Works for Materia 2025
Bronze study (Materia, 2025)
Bronze