NA Meets: Øystein Ustvedt, Munch expert

24/09/20

NA Meets: Øystein Ustvedt, Munch expert

There is a small library of books on Edvard Munch, including several already written by the art critic, curator, and expert on the artist, Øystein Ustvedt. But his new publication, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life, is intended to offer a wide-reaching, all-encompassing introduction for the lay reader.

 

Ustvedt couldn’t be better qualified for the task. He is head of the Stenersen Museum, a curator at the National Museum in Oslo and has curated several exhibitions of Munch’s work. Ahead of the book’s publication, Norwegian Arts talked with Ustvedt about what this volume will offer that others do not, his personal views on the artist he has spent so much time researching, and how he would like to expand his horizons in the future.

Read the full interview here

NA Meets: Kristin Hjellegjerde, gallerist

24/07/20

NA Meets: Kristin Hjellegjerde, gallerist

Following several years moving around the world, Norwegian gallerist Kristin Hjellegjerde and her family settled in London, where she opened her first exhibition space in Wandsworth in 2012.

Today she has established herself as one of the most successful gallerists on the international art scene, with a second UK gallery (in London Bridge), one in Berlin, and a newly-established summer venue in a former shrimp factory in the Norwegian fishing village of Nevlunghavn.

With a stable of 35 international artists, and a distinctive programme for each of her galleries, Hjellegjerde is busier than ever, unflustered by the global pandemic. Norwegian Arts spoke to Hjellegjerde about her familial approach to exhibiting art, what she looks for in artists, and how she has maintained momentum in trying times.

Read the full interview here

NA Meets: Ane Graff, artist

09/07/20

NA Meets: Ane Graff, artist

Ane Graff’s artistic practice is informed by feminist new materialism, with a focus on the human body as a system, health, and chronic illness. 

Born in Bodø in northern Norway, Graff now lives and works in Oslo. As well as making art, and being mother to a young child, Graff is a research fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, where she works in close collaboration with the Department of Biosciences at the University of Oslo, lecturing on microbiology.

In 2019, Graff represented Norway at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her work, States of Inflammation, consisted of three large-scale glass cabinets with smaller sculptures of plants and coral inside. It explored how all material bodies are affected by what they encounter, and, for humans, in particular, how pollution is causing the loss of bacteria that live on, and with, us. Accordingly, our bodies are changing into something new and unknown. 

Next year Graff will be exhibiting in the Liverpool Biennial (postponed from 2020 due to Covid-19). Norwegian Arts spoke to Graff about her varied research interests, her background and training, and life during lockdown.

Read my full interview for Norwegian Arts here

Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

10/04/19

Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

Edvard Munch: love and angst

British Museum

11 April – 21 July 

Although best known today for his paintings, it was through his graphic works that Edvard Munch made his international name. This exhibition at the British Museum, London – the largest of his prints in 45 years and compiled in collaboration with Norway’s Munch Museum – brings together some of his most iconic images, and reunites a number of prints with their matrices, elucidating the various processes involved in their making. Norwegian Arts looks at the artist’s experimental use of lithography, etching and woodcut.

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s inscription at the foot of an 1896 black-and-white lithographic print of his iconic painting The Scream (1893) – ‘I felt the great scream throughout nature’ – is almost as soul-wrenching and shudder-inducing as the world-famous image itself. According to Giulia Bartrum, the curator of the British Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, ‘Edvard Munch: love and angst’ (11 April to 21 July), the wide-mouthed figure shown covering his or her ears, long assumed to be screaming, might, in fact, be hearing the scream rather than uttering it. The full title of the work, The Scream of Nature, similarly supports this standpoint. Either way, the very fact that such discussion is still ongoing, 126 years after the painting of the picture, shows the enduring appeal and intrigue of the Symbolist artist’s work. This lithograph will be one of more than 80 works on display, primarily comprising prints, from the period between 1894, when Munch first began experimenting with graphic media, and the first decade of the 20th century. During this time, Munch travelled a lot between Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), Paris and Berlin. It was in Berlin that he made his first print, aged 30. 

Read the full feature on the Norwegian Arts site

Harald Sohlberg: A National Treasure

08/02/19

Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway

Dulwich Picture Gallery

13 February - 2 June

An Yves Kleinian blue is pierced by the bright, white light of the Evening Star. Beneath it, a range of white mountains rise and fall, like drapery, almost as if breathing, or foaming like the peaks of waves. In the foreground, eerie, bare and broken trees pierce the silent serenity, forming crosses and grave markers, as if amidst the rubble of a battlefield. A vivid expression of the sublime – although, perhaps equally a precursor of the uncanny shivers of the surreal – Winter Night in the Mountains (1914) is arguably the most ambitious work of Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935), and is widely considered to be the ‘national painting of Norway’. It remained his obsession for 14 years, and he produced many versions in his attempts to capture exactly what he wanted.

Although less well known outside of his home country than his contemporary Edvard Munch, Sohlberg is nevertheless being described by Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, as ‘one of the greatest masters of landscape painting in the history of Norwegian art’. Denying the influence of other artists on his work, and attributing the origins of his ‘artistic awakening’ to his own psyche, his oeuvre unites elements of Romanticism, Naturalism and Symbolism, always drawing on the Nordic landscape and its vast potential to depict both the earthly and the infinite. As Dario Gamboni describes in his catalogue essay to accompany the gallery’s forthcoming exhibition, ‘Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway’ (13 February to 2 June), whereas Munch chose to foreground the human figure, treating the landscape as an additional expression of ‘a state of the soul’, Sohlberg focused primarily on the landscape, with the merest hint of human presence. This exhibition, which is travelling from the Nasjonal Museet, Oslo, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth and will be the first solo exhibition of his work outside of Norway. 

Read the full feature for Norwegian Arts here

Interview: Elmgreen & Dragset

09/01/19

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset 

Since unveiling a decaying public swimming pool as part of their major overview exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery back in September, Elmgreen & Dragset – the Berlin-based, Scandi artistic duo comprising Michael Elmgreen (b1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b1969, Trondheim) – have been the talk of the town. Their often parodic and playful work, of course, was already familiar to Londoners and tourists alike (even if the artists’ names remained unknown), as their 4.1-metre golden sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse, Powerless Structures, Fig 101, had regally crowned Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for 18 months from February 2012 – throughout the London Olympic Games – attracting largely positive responses, including from British actress Joanna Lumley, who unveiled the piece, describing herself as ‘thrilled’ to be revealing such a ‘completely unthreatening and adorable creature’ to the public.

Read the full interview here

Interview: Bjarne Melgaard

10/03/18
Bjarne Melgaard: A Contradiction in Terms

‘I don’t do art to make everybody like me and I don’t have any problems with people not liking my work.’ For an artist who has more often than not courted controversy with his paintings, films and installations, this is doubtless a good thing. A lesser character might have kowtowed to criticism and given up his art-making, but not Bjarne Melgaard. ‘I believe in freedom of speech. I don’t see my work as very mainstream, so when I get reactions saying it is stupid, everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I am also entitled to my opinion. As long as you know yourself what you’re doing, and you’re convinced about it, then you can handle anything.’

Melgaard’s current exhibition, which opened on 23 February at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, is by no means as controversial as many of his earlier offerings – which have seen him variously accused of racism, paraphilia and paedophilia. Showing alongside an exhibition of works by Sturtevant, Melgaard’s solo show – his first with the gallery in London – sees the 17th-century Ely Room filled with a suite of 14 new paintings, Bodyparty (Substance Paintings), each 180x180cm. Because of the age of the building, the heavy canvases could not be hung on the walls, and so they stand about, propped up on marble blocks. Melgaard, however, likes this ‘improvised’ feel, echoing the ‘casual easiness’ with which the works stand on the floor in his studio, and describes the whole coming together of the exhibition, proposed to him ‘at very short notice’ by Ropac’s new senior global director, and former director of Serpentine Galleries, Julia Peyton-Jones, as ‘very organic and very fast’.

Read the full interview on the Norwegian Arts website here