Untitled Landscapes, 2012
11 May - 03 Jun 2012
UNTITLED LANDSCAPES, 2012
Hanne Borchgrevink, Andreas Eriksson, Toril Johannessen, Ole Jørgen Ness, Jenny Rydhagen and Janicke Schønning
11 May – 3 June 2012
LAUTOM is proud to present the exhibition Untitled Landscapes, 2012 with Hanne Borchgrevink, Andreas Eriksson, Toril Johannessen, Ole Jørgen Ness, Jenny Rydhagen and Janicke Schønning on Friday the 11th of May at 7 PM to 9 PM. The exhibition lasts until the 3rd of June.
The artists in this exhibition use landscape to tell or explore what it means to be human, what culture is or what shapes the world we live in. These landscapes are not grandiose, they are rather depictions of details of landscapes, or images of more trivial landscapes. Some of the motivation to make this exhibition is probably that I myself once tried to paint landscapes, and the source from which my desire to examine how contemporary artists treat the landscape has arisen. In many ways, this exhibition is also a list of works and artists that have contributed to shape me and my interest in art, or my own wish list of works and artists to incorporate into my own art collection.
In the early 2000s, I was on Lyngør on holiday, visiting Jenny Rydhagen. In the small garden just above the quay, with a big green curtain and a large format camera, Jenny worked on an image that would later take part in her solo show at Galleri Wang. A little above the summer house was a little sheltered lawn, which I was asked to mow. For hours I lay on all four in the grass, surrounded by bushes and rocks, and cut the grass with scissors, not because I had no other tools available, but because it was nice and meditative with this close contact to the green straws and to take control over the green grass that was allowed to grow freely for most of the year. I did not ponder on then that what I did in many ways was to enter into Jenny's long-term project to capture the interaction between culture and nature.
A few years ago Janicke Schønning moved almost reluctantly from central Oslo to the forest in Sørkedalen outside of Oslo. She found herself surrounded by a dense spruce forest that she perceived as foreign. It was not until she entered the woods with ink and paper, found places where she nailed drawing boards to the trees and started using the forest as her studio, she felt these new surroundings to become her's. In winter, she allows the ink to freeze, in spring she allows the colours to be washed away by rain. Her works are not only images of nature, she also lets nature take part in the drawing process.
Andreas Eriksson's artistic project also changed when he moved to Kinnekulle in Sweden. Eriksson became interested in nature's unpredictability, coincidences of the forms in nature, as something you do not fully control, such as the hills a mole makes in his yard. Through sculpture, photography and painting, he sensitively depicts the nature outside of his studio window. But by using his surroundings, he is trying just as much to understand himself, as he is exploring the world around him.
Toril Johannessen is concerned with the relationship between art and science. Landscape does not have an important role in her practice, but science and nature do. She uses a visual language that has a relationship to a scientific practice in order to describe and perhaps better understand the world as it is described by science, but in contrast to science, she does not seek a mere truth.
Hanne Borchgrevink 's works are seldom pure landscapes, her paintings are formal studies of a simplified idea of a house, set in an even simpler landscape. Her houses can be read as symbols of man, the idea of a home, of culture or a sense of belonging. There is something distinctive with the open, slow ability to immerse herself in a serial production creating a narrative not easy to grab hold of, but also the way she treats the surface, the colours and the motive. She creates silent poetry.
In 2006 I found myself in Bergen at the festival exhibition of Ole Jørgen Ness. His show appeared to me as the work I wanted to, but did not dare or succeeded in creating myself. Ole Jørgen Ness does not use landscapes that surround him, his landscapes express aspects of his personality without having any correlation to a physical outer world. They are rather about painting itself, how to apply paint to canvas. He paints his inner landscapes, without reference to a physical external nature, and he is apparently without fear of the clichés of landscape. They are not about the Norwegian landscape that I had wanted to portray, they are about painting, colour and his emotions and inner demons.
Randi Thommessen, May 2012
Hanne Borchgrevink, Andreas Eriksson, Toril Johannessen, Ole Jørgen Ness, Jenny Rydhagen and Janicke Schønning
11 May – 3 June 2012
LAUTOM is proud to present the exhibition Untitled Landscapes, 2012 with Hanne Borchgrevink, Andreas Eriksson, Toril Johannessen, Ole Jørgen Ness, Jenny Rydhagen and Janicke Schønning on Friday the 11th of May at 7 PM to 9 PM. The exhibition lasts until the 3rd of June.
The artists in this exhibition use landscape to tell or explore what it means to be human, what culture is or what shapes the world we live in. These landscapes are not grandiose, they are rather depictions of details of landscapes, or images of more trivial landscapes. Some of the motivation to make this exhibition is probably that I myself once tried to paint landscapes, and the source from which my desire to examine how contemporary artists treat the landscape has arisen. In many ways, this exhibition is also a list of works and artists that have contributed to shape me and my interest in art, or my own wish list of works and artists to incorporate into my own art collection.
In the early 2000s, I was on Lyngør on holiday, visiting Jenny Rydhagen. In the small garden just above the quay, with a big green curtain and a large format camera, Jenny worked on an image that would later take part in her solo show at Galleri Wang. A little above the summer house was a little sheltered lawn, which I was asked to mow. For hours I lay on all four in the grass, surrounded by bushes and rocks, and cut the grass with scissors, not because I had no other tools available, but because it was nice and meditative with this close contact to the green straws and to take control over the green grass that was allowed to grow freely for most of the year. I did not ponder on then that what I did in many ways was to enter into Jenny's long-term project to capture the interaction between culture and nature.
A few years ago Janicke Schønning moved almost reluctantly from central Oslo to the forest in Sørkedalen outside of Oslo. She found herself surrounded by a dense spruce forest that she perceived as foreign. It was not until she entered the woods with ink and paper, found places where she nailed drawing boards to the trees and started using the forest as her studio, she felt these new surroundings to become her's. In winter, she allows the ink to freeze, in spring she allows the colours to be washed away by rain. Her works are not only images of nature, she also lets nature take part in the drawing process.
Andreas Eriksson's artistic project also changed when he moved to Kinnekulle in Sweden. Eriksson became interested in nature's unpredictability, coincidences of the forms in nature, as something you do not fully control, such as the hills a mole makes in his yard. Through sculpture, photography and painting, he sensitively depicts the nature outside of his studio window. But by using his surroundings, he is trying just as much to understand himself, as he is exploring the world around him.
Toril Johannessen is concerned with the relationship between art and science. Landscape does not have an important role in her practice, but science and nature do. She uses a visual language that has a relationship to a scientific practice in order to describe and perhaps better understand the world as it is described by science, but in contrast to science, she does not seek a mere truth.
Hanne Borchgrevink 's works are seldom pure landscapes, her paintings are formal studies of a simplified idea of a house, set in an even simpler landscape. Her houses can be read as symbols of man, the idea of a home, of culture or a sense of belonging. There is something distinctive with the open, slow ability to immerse herself in a serial production creating a narrative not easy to grab hold of, but also the way she treats the surface, the colours and the motive. She creates silent poetry.
In 2006 I found myself in Bergen at the festival exhibition of Ole Jørgen Ness. His show appeared to me as the work I wanted to, but did not dare or succeeded in creating myself. Ole Jørgen Ness does not use landscapes that surround him, his landscapes express aspects of his personality without having any correlation to a physical outer world. They are rather about painting itself, how to apply paint to canvas. He paints his inner landscapes, without reference to a physical external nature, and he is apparently without fear of the clichés of landscape. They are not about the Norwegian landscape that I had wanted to portray, they are about painting, colour and his emotions and inner demons.
Randi Thommessen, May 2012