Pleasure, quietness, wellness, rest, surrender, immersion: everything slips away as the tubs are drained. And yet the traces, impressions of bodies and memories of skin remain. Past lives condense in the accumulation of these discarded shells — once called "Dream", "Tahiti", "Serenity", "Eden", the onomastics of a prefab luxury now returning as a muted echo. Objects once intimate are now exposed and overstated, reduced to pure mass and volumes, overturning and erasing any reference to well-being.

Charlotte Thrane combines multiple tubs into a single body, elevating them to simulacra of technological well-being and soundness — landmarks for innovative design industries, promises of comfort, machines of pleasure. By reducing the tubs to essential geometries, she generates an abstraction of both sculptural and painterly elements: voids and reliefs, soft lines and bulging edges, glossy finishes that catch shifting reflections. Her aesthetic-based approach to this composition of lines and forms recalls the stucco lustro technique, which constructs depth through surface, layering light, pigment, and gesture. Thrane appropriates that lineage of surface-making to divert it: she suggests a personal theory of ornament grounded in the industrial object, turning the fiberglass tub into a luminous surrogate for stucco and marble, redefining the relation between surface and volume, decoration and interiors.

This monumental work has been made to fit the architectural features of the exhibition space. The hot tubs function as ambiguous markers of an uncanny domestic landscape, marked by curves and circular paths: the arched glass façade and, inside, the built-in arch whose form the work subtly mirrors, with its smooth profiles and the circular arrangement of each element. These forms respond to one another, generating a continuous loop that guides the gaze from outside to inside and further inward, contracting into the vortex of the drain. Through this centrifugal and centripetal interplay, the work activates the architecture with a measured kinetic tension, drawing its lines into a single, circulating field of form. We may be witnessing a “synthetic Baroque,” as the work generates a tension between spectacle and everyday life, luxury and decay, intimacy and hyper-exposure, imagination and innovation: a brief post-industrial history of our needs.


—Ilaria Monti
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Charlotte Thrane lives and works in Copenhagen, DK. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, UK, in 2003. Thrane's works are centred around sculptural experience, and speak directly to the body and the senses as aesthetic and spatial gestures. Central to the works are the traces and markings that we leave through touch and through living.
Thrane’s works are included in a number of private and public collections, including Deutsche Bank, DE, The Edward James Foundation, UK, and Ernst & Young, UK. She has exhibited widely in Denmark, as well as internationally, and has recently carried out two permanent public commissions.
She is represented by Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, DE, and was in 2022 commissioned to realise a large site-specific installation at the Balenciaga flagship store in Miami, US. In 2026 Thrane will be having her first institutional solo exhibition at Glas Museum in Denmark.
Recent solo and group exhibitions include: 2025, Råstoffer at Gammelgaard, Cph, DK; Wi-fi and Watercolours at Zeller van Almsick, Vienna, AT; 2024, Carte Verte at The French Embassy, Cph, DK; Nature’s Voices at VASTO, Barcelona, ES; Construct at Cob Gallery, London, UK; Abstract Sensibility at 2112, Cph, DK; Art Düsseldorf at Galerie Parisa Kind, DE; 2023, Accumulations at inter.pblc, Cph, DK.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Beckett Foundation, Fake Foundation, Konsul George Jorck og Hustru Emma Jorck’s Foundation, and the Danish Arts Foundation.