Ragna Bley’s “Oyster” at Pilar Corrias, London: Painting with Ice, Salt and the Edge of the Canvas

Some paintings are made standing up, at arm’s length, with the painter in charge. Ragna Bley’s are made lying down — the canvas flat on the studio floor, scattered with salt, snow and ice, then left for the weather of the room to finish the job. That way of working, half control and half surrender, is at the heart of Ragna Bley: Oyster at Pilar Corrias, London, a show of new large-scale paintings, sculptural pillars and small ceramics on view at 51 Conduit Street from 13 November 2026 to 23 January 2027.

Who is Ragna Bley?

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1986 and based in Oslo, Bley works across painting, sculpture, text and performance. Her sources are unusually broad for a painter: biology, literature and science fiction all feed a practice that, in the gallery’s words, explores the familiar and the alien. Over the past decade she has built a serious Scandinavian institutional record — Zooid at Kunsthall Oslo in 2017, Stranger’s Eye at Kunstnernes Hus in 2022, presented with Malmö Konsthall, and group shows at the Henie Onstad Art Center and Gammel Strand in Copenhagen. Her work sits in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Buffalo AKG Museum and X Museum in Beijing; she was nominated for the Ars Fennica Prize in 2025, and a solo exhibition at Vandalorum in Sweden is planned for 2027.

Oyster is her third solo outing with Pilar Corrias, following Viridian Land (2022) and Move Baby, Move (2025). A third show is often the one where an artist stops introducing herself and starts arguing a position. This one has a clear subject: the border.

The anatomy of a Bley surface

For painters, the most rewarding way into the show is technical. Bley layers spray paint, transparent mediums, marbling, oil and acrylic, so that the weight of the paint shifts across a single canvas — dense and pooled in one passage, thin as a stain in the next. Marbling, a technique borrowed from paper decoration, lets colour float and drift before it settles. Spray paint gives a soft, atmospheric haze no brush can reproduce. Oil and acrylic, which do not naturally behave alike, add further friction.

Then come the salt, snow and ice. As ice melts on a wet surface it carries pigment with it and leaves tide-lines where it stops; salt pulls water toward itself and blooms. The artist sets the conditions; the materials decide the details. The compositions, the gallery notes, grow from intuitive mark-making movements rather than a pre-planned image. The result is a picture that records its own making the way a beach records a tide.

Borders that hold and leak

What gives the new paintings their tension is a counterweight to all that drift. Colour spreads and pools, but shapes press toward hard, constructed edges — a limit, as the press release puts it, that “the paint can reach but does not cross.” The question running through the exhibition is where one thing ends and another begins: a painting and the wall, one environment and the next, the natural and the human-made. The gallery describes these borders as both fixed and porous, and that double quality is visible in the work — a crisp line that the eye accepts, and a wash of colour that seems to have seeped right up to it.

There is also an ecological undertow. The paintings carry an unease about systems too large or complex to understand fully, and about the blurring boundary between what grows and what is manufactured. A painting partly made by melting ice is a quiet but pointed metaphor in that context. One of the new canvases, Its Own Weather (2026), lends the exhibition its lead image, and its title could stand for the whole method.

Pillars, ceramics and the room itself

Oyster is not a paintings-only hang. Sculptural pillars stand through the gallery, echoing the architecture of the building, and small palm-sized ceramics cling to them or lie scattered across the floor. Their uncertain, half-formed shapes relate to figures that recur in Bley’s paintings, so the ceramics read like creatures that have crawled out of the canvases into the room. The title fits: an oyster is a soft living thing inside a hard edge, a body that makes its own boundary.

Pilar Corrias and the London context

Pilar Corrias has two Mayfair spaces, at 51 Conduit Street and 2 Savile Row, and a programme known for international painters and artists who stretch painting toward installation. Mid-November is a strong moment to open in London: the autumn fair season has passed, collectors and curators are still in town, and the city’s gallery calendar shifts toward considered solo presentations. A Nordic painter with museum backing and a distinctive process is exactly the kind of artist this slot tends to reward.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

• For painters: a working lesson in using chance as a tool — how to set conditions with materials such as salt and ice, then edit with deliberate edges.
• For collectors: an artist at a clear inflection point, with strong Scandinavian institutional support, international collection holdings and a 2027 museum solo on the horizon.
• For anyone interested in abstraction: evidence that abstract painting can carry ecological and philosophical content without illustrating it.

Visiting information

Pilar Corrias, 51 Conduit Street, London W1S 2YT. 13 November 2026 – 23 January 2027; opening reception Thursday 12 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Friday 10am–6pm and Saturday 11am–6pm, Monday by appointment, closed Sunday. Phone +44 (0)20 7323 7000, [email protected]. See the official exhibition page, our Oyster listing for full details, and Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more openings in London and beyond.