Project Room: Shifting Ground: Benny Brankovic

About

Working across painting, sculpture, and ceramics, Brankovic continues his exploration of how material, surface, and spatial construction shape perception and lived experience.

At the centre of Shifting Ground are four paintings in which enamel and vinyl surfaces flow between gloss and deep matte. These material tensions pull the eye in competing directions, heightened by the recurring presence of Mosuo Black, which anchors and unsettles the compositions simultaneously. As with much of Brankovic’s practice, colour operates not descriptively but psychologically; planes of saturated pigment press outward, resisting containment within the canvas and activating the surrounding space.

The exhibition unfolds as a constructed environment. Angled planes emerge not as disruptions, but as subtle prompts - destabilising the expectation of a fixed viewpoint and inviting a reconsideration of what is held as secure. This spatial articulation extends Brankovic’s ongoing dialogue between object and environment, where meaning is not inherent but contingent, shaped through encounter and orientation.

Motifs of plants, flowers, and introverted figures recur throughout the works, appearing in quiet, suspended encounters where communication unfolds without words. These elements, familiar yet estranged, reflect Brankovic’s interest in depicting scenes as they are felt and remembered rather than observed directly. Forms overlap and fragment while interior and exterior states collapse into one another, producing images that hover between intimacy and distance.

Three sculptures extend this language into three dimensions. Flattened, patterned vases give rise to floral forms, their jagged surfaces disrupting expectations of texture and volume. Here, the tension between containment and expansion becomes physical, as objects appear simultaneously held and in motion, resisting stable categorisation.

Across the exhibition, a persistent friction emerges between surface and depth, stillness and movement, grounding and disorientation. Brankovic’s works do not resolve these oppositions but sustain them, creating a perceptual space in which orientation is continually negotiated. In Shifting Ground, the ground itself is not a given, but something constructed, tested, and perpetually in flux.

Recent solo exhibitions include Read My Back (Albert Contemporary, 2024), Broken Flowers (Outpost, Copenhagen, 2023), and Sacro Profano (Inter.pblc, Copenhagen, 2023). In 2025, Brankovic presented the duo exhibition Reflected Shadows at the Danish Cultural Center, 798 Art District, Beijing, and completed a residency at Galleria Spazio21, Reggio Emilia. In parallel with his exhibition practice, Brankovic is the founder and Creative Director of Le Fix, a platform and brand through which he has realised collaborations with partners including Star Wars/Disney, Clarks, Umbro, and H.C. Andersen’s House & Museum, with presentations at Dover Street Market. He lives and works in Copenhagen.