Klokken er mange: A Note on Time in the Art of Lilith Black Bee

About

Known for her intricate, meditative art, Lilith transforms the quiet anxiety of life into visual fields of stillness, structure, and strength. Her work is both therapy and testimony: a daily return to calm through gesture and repetition.

The exhibition brings together works from four of her ongoing series: Now, Pieces of Self, Peace of Mind, and Wilderness. Each explores a different emotional or psychological terrain, from stillness to fragmentation, from inner order to wildness.

Her materials are modest — ink and watercolor — but her discipline and execution are extraordinary. In these works, every line is drawn with a steady hand, each stroke a study in control and care. The surfaces she builds are both precise and tender, unfolding slowly like breath held and released. Though conceptual and abstract, her works are grounded in craft. Her hands are trained. Her skills, solid.

In her series Now, Lilith writes down time — literally — using handwritten numbers. One by one, they fill the page like a mantra, a ritual, or a visual metronome. It is a devotional act. This practice finds deep resonance with the work of Roman Opałka, the Polish conceptual artist who spent decades painting sequential numbers as a lifelong record of time. The final number he painted was 5,607,249.

Her work also enters into quiet dialogue with Japanese artist On Kawara, whose Date Paintings, each a monochrome canvas marked with the date of its making, reduce the passage of time to its starkest, most human terms: I was here. I lived this day.

“I have never been more present in the present than now,” she writes. “I’m always somewhere in between past and future, but I’m in ‘NOW’ when I’m counting seconds.” For her, the paper is space. The numbers, time. Her plan is to transcribe 31,556,926 seconds — the total in one year — across more than 10,000 sheets of paper. It may take her the rest of her life.

Yet, like Kawara, Lilith is not in a hurry. Her work is not about spectacle or speed. It is about presence. Her lines are made with ultra-fine pens, each one a breath, a moment, a mark of continued existence. Like Opałka and Kawara, Lilith makes time visible by dwelling within it — number by number, stroke by stroke.

The exhibition title, Klokken er mange, takes its name from a Danish phrase meaning “it’s late.” Danish is a language known for its directness: often spare, practical, and unsentimental. And yet in this phrase, there is a distinct poetic beauty. Klokken er mange does not simply describe the hour. It names a feeling — the moment you realise time has passed because you were immersed in something that, most likely, mattered.

Lilith Black Bee’s drawings live in that in-between — between repetition and release, attention and absence. Klokken er mange is a quiet recognition that something meaningful has passed through us, unnoticed until the moment we looked up.

This exhibition invites viewers into that space — to linger, to breathe, and perhaps, to both feel and forget time for a moment. Life, after all, is made of moments. And each of her works, in their humble size, is quietly monumental.

Klokken er mange: A Note on Time in the Art of Lilith Black Bee runs from 19 June to 19 July 2025. An Opening Reception will be held from 14:00-16:00 on 21 June. The artist will be present. All are welcome.