Martine Poppe’s Pixelated Skyscapes Are Reminders of Our World’s Fragile Climate

Martine Poppe’s paintings, at once meditative and grandiose, depict the fragile, fleeting qualities of light as it works its way across a drama of clouds and open sky. In Poppe’s latest solo show, “A Piece of Me,” at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London, all but two of her works are cloudscapes. Recalling the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, Poppe’s sunbleached clouds—rendered in a pale and understated palette—dissolve into a luminous atmosphere, unifying form and light. Now, at a time of ecological crisis and hyperconnectivity, these skyscapes also become markers of environmental anxiety.

Born in Norway in 1988 to a photographer mother and a sailmaker father, Poppe views photography as central to her practice; it is, for the painter, a form of sketching. In a nod to her parents, Poppe prints large-scale digital images of her own photographs and covers them with translucent sailcloth, upon which she applies oil paint in rapid, regular strokes. The resulting paintings carry the effects of diffracted light and overexposed photography, as well as the pixelation of blown-up digital images. But the ultimate success of these works comes from the way they unsettle the viewer.