Pulse / Pause

ChertLüdde presents Pulse / Pause, a solo exhibition by Norvegian painter Tyra Tingleff (1984, Hönefoss, Norway). In this exhibition, Tingleff works with a unified palette for the first time, focusing on reds and purples, accented by rich contrasts and bright flashes in her evocative abstract paintings. Based between Oslo and Berlin, Tyra Tingleff embraces the fluid, unpredictable nature of oil paint. Educated at the Royal College of Art in London, the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, and the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen, she has continually stretched the boundaries of the medium by favoring experimentation over traditional techniques. In this latest series, her style evolves once again, moving toward an almost symmetrical pattern of rounded, blossoming forms. Departing from the looser abstraction of her earlier work, she began using a more calculated, systematized approach—one in which she maintains control, yet allows the forms to move within the structure she has set. While some of Tingleff's compositions in the exhibition radiate from a single anchor point, others hold multiple centers that coexist like stanzas in a poem. In Tingleff's paintings, pools of thinned oil paint suggest the speculative metamorphosis of a bloom, a bruise, or perhaps a body—emerging through subtle gradient shifts and carefully defined edges that create a cropped framing. Dense and suggestive, these focal points remain intentionally ambiguous, saturated with emotional intensity and a lived, unspoken femininity. As flowers or organs or exposed flesh, Tingleff's compositions flirt with figuration without ever fully conceding to it, evoking a sensuality rooted in the body without depicting it outright. This ambiguity aligns her with Abstract artists such as Joan Snyder (1940, Highland Park, U.S.), whose Body and Soul (1997–1998) shows legs spread to expose a purple vulva. But where Snyder is explicit, Tingleff is elusive. Her bodily references are submerged within layers of paint. Tingleff's paintings become records of embodiment—of labor, emotions and a femininity lightly touched upon instead of directly represented. As with all her paintings, Tingleff's most recent artworks resist resolution, unfolding instead through cycles of passion and doubt. There are moments of pulse, moments of pause—and between them, a visual language emerges that is both poetic and organic. Like shifts in an internal landscape, Tingleff's paintings chart a space where the intimate and the abstract move as one. To accompany the exhibition, the original chapbook Proprietary Method / June July by American poet Tess Brown-Lavoie will be published by Cutt Press in collaboration with ChertLüdde Books. Partly written during the same period Tingleff was creating her paintings, the chapbook offers a literary counterpoint that echoes the exhibition's atmosphere and temporality. Portrait of Tyra Tingleff by Jon Gorospe. Tyra Tingleff (b. 1984, Hönefoss, Norway) lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, with a Master's in Painting in 2013 and the National Academy of the Arts Bergen in 2008. Typically kept to a portrait format, Tyra Tingleff's expansive visual world is fluid, punk and unrestrained. Combining a manifold of techniques in her oil paintings on raw canvas, Tingleff balances vibrant shades and hues that refract like sedimentary layers. With an infinity of decisions coursing beneath each trace the paint leaves behind, Tingleff's work operates at the spillage of foreground and background. Gathering various layers of pigment, Tingleff creates immense fields of color that twist and blend as they sink together on untreated fabric. Dripping and staining the linen, her smooth layers of paint appear molten, obscuring any points of reference the eye searches for. This manipulation of depth and her distinctive style allows Tingleff to stand out amongst the long lineage of abstract painters who came before her. By appealing directly to the viewer, the paintings invite one into an endless loop of deciphering, composing a febrile universe punctuated by the chance possibilities that went into each piece. Her first monograph, Of Course I'm Not Sorry, was published by Mousse in March 2022. Tess Brown-Lavoie is author of Lite Year, winner of the Fence Modern Poet Series Prize. Brown-Lavoie co-founded Sidewalk Ends Farm in 2011, and was recently the Anne Waldman Fellow at Naropa University. Brown-Lavoie teaches writing to architecture students at Pratt. Cutt Press is an independent publisher based in Berlin, run by Erin Warner Honeycutt. Since 2020, Cutt Press has published zines, pamphlets, and archival reprints in collaboration with the Hopscotch Reading Room.

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