A Map of Memory and Myth:
The Visionary Art of Natalia Rose
Danish artist Natalia Rose, born in 1953 in Stavropol (Russia), creates a compelling body of work that straddles the borders of memory, myth, and abstraction. With formal education in Philology and Literature from Lomonosov Moscow State University and a Master of Arts in film and Danish language from the University of Copenhagen, Rose brings a literate and conceptual approach to her visual language. Based in Copenhagen since 1981, she held her first exhibition there in 2014 and has since exhibited in major cities such as New York, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam. Her paintings are now held in private collections across North America and Europe.
Rose’s artistic practice is characterized by a deeply personal approach to abstraction. She refers to her paintings as visual recollections, rather than direct observations, and blends Eastern and Western mythological references into emotionally charged compositions.
With thick expressive brushwork and layered acrylic textures, her work evokes both inner topographies and symbolic narratives. Through a signature visual vocabulary of iconographic gestures and richly modulated surfaces, she constructs painterly statements, that pose philosophical questions about the nature of seeing and expressing meaning.
In “What the Flower Wanted to Tell You” a luminous violet bloom opens against a deep, verdant backdrop, its petal-like forms rendered with dynamic linework and a translucent palette of blues and purples. The flower becomes a protagonist—part memory, part metaphor—encapsulating the artist’s tendency to elevate familiar forms into expressive carriers of emotional resonance. In “Chronos,” Rose departs into a vigorous, almost chaotic field of gestural abstraction, where dark and golden pigments swirl in a central burst of movement. The work reflects on time, transformation, and entropy, aligning her practice with the material urgency of abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell and Antoni Tàpies. Her tactile surfaces and chromatic shifts also recall the textural explorations of Anselm Kiefer, yet remain grounded in her own meditative syntax.
What makes Rose’s work so distinctive is her ability to synthesize the poetic with the primal. Her paintings are at once deeply reflective and radically immediate—windows into an interior mythos shaped by language, memory and cultural layering. She distills intangible ideas into visceral forms, capturing the viewer not with narrative resolution, but through a sustained emotional ambiguity. At the heart of her practice lies an insistence that abstract and symbolic mark-making still holds the power to communicate, to evoke and to connect across time and place. In this way, Natalia Rose’s contribution to contemporary painting is both resonant and essential.
© 2014 Natalia Rose