Artist Ida Ekblad @ Peder Lund, Oslo - "ACTIVATED SLUDGE" Exhibition

Ida Ekblad: EACTIVATED SLUDGE 

Peder Lund, Oslo

June 1st - August 31, 2024

Ida Ekblad 

MUD DEVOTION, 2024

© Ida Ekblad,courtesy of Peder Lund

Ida Ekblad 

GOO RAPT, 2024

© Ida Ekblad,courtesy of Peder Lund

Ida Ekblad 

AMPHIDROMIC ECHOES, 2024 

Installation view, ReCollect! Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, 2024

© Ida Ekblad, courtesy of Kunsthaus Zürich and Peder Lund

Sludge is a thick wet substance. So is paint. So is glass. They are soupy materials. Liquid visuals. Color materialized. When in their sludgy state, I handle them. Activate them. Hyper-activate them. Hands-on. Fidget with fingers. Hand over my presence. Give them attention. Inattention. Attention. Inattention. Attentin. I forgot the o. Activation. Waste water. Decomposition. Bleed. All over. Goo. I must handle them before they dry, before they cool down. They cool. They dry. They harden.

— Ida Ekblad, 2024

Perder Lund presents the exhibition ACTIVATED SLUDGE featuring new works by the Norwegian artist IDA EKBLAD (b. 1980).

For close to twenty years, Ida Ekblad has been one of the most original and influential artistic voices of her generation. Her prodigious and playful imagination has been rooted in a deep reverence for artists such as Odilon Redon, Paula Modersohn Becker, Paul Thek, Harriet Backer, Edvard Munch, Florine Stettheimer, and Helen Frankenthaler. Her resulting works are exquisitely vibrant free-associative compositions pairing dissonance with visual inventiveness; in producing electrically vivid paintings, drawings, and sculpture, along with her forays in performance, poetry, and filmmaking, and now works in glass, Ida Ekblad continually re-invents and re-invigorates her oeuvre, luxuriating in the twenty-first century's hyper-visual and materially oversaturated ethos. She embraces Dionysian excesses and her penchant for overloaded and baroque aesthetics have been critically lauded.

For Ida Ekblad's exhibition, titled ACTIVATED SLUDGE, her second at Peder Lund, she has chosen to include a selection of works in diverse media — new large-scale and intimately-sized oil paintings, an example of her recent production of monumental hand-painted bronze sculpture, and two mesmerizing examples of works in glass — produced in collaboration with a famed furnace in Murano, Italy. These wall-mounted glass works are pushing into new territory for the artist, however, maintain a distinctly "Ekblad-ian" take on the material. Ida Ekblad has evolved her signature colorful, glossy aesthetic, which defines her beloved oil paintings; in this latest endeavor, she ventures into the ethereal realm of hand-blown glass, infusing her creations with a captivating interplay of light, form, and texture.

For her glass works, Ida Ekblad has envisioned mandala-like constellations of repeating forms. Although created to explore a repetition of color and shape, the hand-crafted and somewhat unpredictable nature of glass combines to form individual pieces that retain subtle variations between each other. The circular arrangement reminds one of seeing a zoopraxiscope stopped for just a moment, before continuing to endlessly spin, summoning animated flowers blooming or centrifugal paint being flung from its center. As Muybridge invented his clever device in the early days of motion pictures, here Ida Ekblad has frozen a moment, capturing in exquisite detail the forms that make up the whole. Through Ida Ekblad's exploration of the medium of glass, she invites viewers to immerse themselves in a new dimension of her artistic expression, where the boundaries between materiality and imagination blur.

Painting to me combines expressions of rhythm, poetry, scent, emotion..... It offers ways to articulate the spaces between words, and I cannot be concerned with its death, when working with it as it makes me feel so alive.

— Ida Ekblad, 2010

Ida Ekblad 

SWAMP FLUSH, 2024 

© Ida Ekblad,courtesy of Peder Lund

Ida Ekblad's paintings in the exhibition continue her affair with oil paint, a material she has used almost exclusively since 2019. Ida Ekblad's production is extremely time- and labor-intensive. She begins by applying layers of thick oil paint as a base, which eventually forms a fantastically thick foundation of rich pigments. Each layer must dry completely before the next layer can be applied. The process of creating a work can take several months to years because the heavy oil paint needs time to settle in. Once Ida Ekblad is satisfied with these base layers, she finishes each piece with thin layers of glaze, consisting of color pigment suspended in walnut oil, which also must dry between each layer. Through her insistence on using thick and thin layers of paint, the final work has a luminous, enamel-like finish that is only achievable through such extreme dedication to the process. After drying on the floor, the pieces' jewel-like caleidoscope of color subtly exists in a delicate balance with each other, like panes of stained glass set into place, illuminated by an inner glow. As historian Andreas Aubert described Harriet Backer's Blue Interior upon viewing it for the first time, so too can we say that in Ida Ekblad's paintings, "Every atom is color."

Ida Ekblad has noted that her work is often inspired by personal memories, however, in the end, the works created provide an explosive sense of retro-future abstract centripetal release. In the 1974 film "A Woman Under the Influence" by Cassevettes, the character of Mabel particularly resonates with Ida Ekblad; she exemplifies "a sort of domesticity gone bananas" that can be seen in the paintings in the gallery, all finished in 2024. Unapologetically feminine, the paintings tumble through abstracted forms, like rolls of intricately patterned fabrics bundled together, with recognizable petals of roses and pansies or Breton-striped shirt sleeves peeking through. Picasso's Harlequin is present. Whether vertically or horizontally oriented, these paintings provide a dizzying, whirlwind feeling, as if you are stealing a glimpse of one of Ida Ekblad's peripatetic, phantasmagorical nightly dreams.

Finally, the included example of Ida Ekblad's recent production of large-scale hand-painted bronze sculpture succinctly captures many threads of the artist's fascination with material and process. Titled AMPHIDROMIC ECHOES the work was assembled by applying the cubist method of a jigsaw-puzzle-like composition of elements that are outlined in flat surfaces, like the cut-out of a collage.Ida Ekblad reinvigorates the technique and creates a multi-perspective synthesis of mind and memory. By summoning the idea of tidal waves through its enigmatic title, the sculpture invites the viewer to explore its intricate textural and compositional moments fully in the round.

Portrait of Ida Ekblad

Photo © Jacqueline Landvik

Courtesy of Peder Lund

IDA EKBLAD lives and works in Oslo. She is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2007) and the Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles, USA (2008). She participated in the Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), as well as in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In addition to her most recent solo show in 2021 at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, her work has been presented at a variety of institutions in solo exhibitions, among them Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2019) and Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2017); National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, Oslo, Norway (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2010); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2010).

Together with Matias Faldbakken, Ida Ekblad's work is currently installed at Kunsthaus Zürich for the institution's ongoing exhibitions series ReCollect! which places newly created works by contemporary artists in dialogue with the museum's permanent collection. ReCollect! will continue through the summer.

Ida Ekblad's work is owned by a multitude of important public and private institutions and collections around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; British Museum, London, UK; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Norway; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27 - 0252 Oslo 

pederlund.no

Catherine Opie @ Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo - "Walls, Windows and Blood" Exhibition

Catherine Opie 

Walls, Windows and Blood 

Peder Lund, Oslo  

January 20 – 23 March 2024 

CATHERINE OPIE 

Blood grid #3 (detail), 2023 

© Catherine Opie, courtesy the artist and Peder Lund

Peder Lund presents the exhibition Walls, Windows and Blood with works by the American artist Catherine Opie (1961).

Over the past twenty years, Catherine Opie has created a boldly original and complex body of photographic work that explores notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. Tackling such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography, she has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. From her lustrous portraits of the queer subcultures of Los Angeles and San Francisco to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York, Catherine Opie has imbued her otherwise overlooked or misrepresented subjects with a newfound sense of dignity and respect. She also references the aesthetic identity of the great American photographers, whose work she quotes and refracts in her images. All the while she has maintained a formal rigor and technical mastery over her chosen medium, working in stark and provocative color, and richly toned black-and-white. Keenly aware of art-historical standards and contemporary political attitudes, Catherine Opie purposefully creates photographs that function as objective records and subjective interpretations. Catherine Opie has in this fashion produced some of the most striking and important photographs of the 1990s and 2000s.

Catherine Opie creates discrete bodies of work in series, each with specific parameters. Opie's three latest series of work, titled Blood Grids, Walls, and Windows were conceived and photographed while the artist completed her residency at the American Academy in Rome. Selections from each of these series are installed at Peder Lund for the artist's exhibition at the gallery, titled Walls, Windows and Blood. A singular print, titled No Apology (June 5, 2021), is also included. This is the artist's third exhibition with the gallery; it has been ten years since the artist's last installation at Peder Lund, however, in that time, the gallery has assisted with important solo institutional exhibitions and placed her work in some of the most prestigious public and private collections in the world. 

In each of the four sets of Blood Grids, Catherine Opie has arranged twelve photographs in a grid, with each photograph showing close-up details of the bodies of men, women, and animals. These details were taken from masterworks from the Vatican Museums, which the artist had unprecedented access to due to the unique circumstances of the Covid pandemic. As the artist detailed in an interview with Cristina Ruiz for The Gentlewoman Magazine, "I'd be in the Sistine Chapel and there would be five other people there. I got to experience the Vatican like nobody experiences the Vatican." Opie continues, "A lot of my work is about revealing different ideas of systems: either community or identity. But what is identity? And how do we begin to unpack it? And how do we unpack it in relationship to physical structures?"

In these images, which depict stabbings, beheadings, crucifixions, and blunt force, Catherine Opie has distilled the Catholic church's message of violence which lies at the foundation of Western culture and art. The decadent wool, silk, silver and gold thread used to create the magnificent Vatican tapestries and the richly colored, often gilt, and precisely detailed painted masterpieces complicate for the viewer these images of gruesome death and destruction.

Catherine Opie has remarked that even though she was born to a Midwestern family in 1961, she was raised mostly as an atheist — a highly unusual occurrence for this time and place in America. The artist did, on occasion, grapple with this familial peculiarity, once attempting, at 13, to "find Christ" after a drive-in screening of the classic horror film The Exorcist. This moment of religious fear, however, was only temporary, as Catherine Opie states, "Coming out as queer gave me more intense skepticism of religion as people in the 1980s rallied with cries of 'You're going to hell.'"

Catherine Opie's Blood Grids, when seen in the context of her position in the queer community, feel sadly prescient for the current political climate in the United States. Countless highly detrimental laws have been introduced or passed in the country which aim to systematically dismantle the health care, political position, and personal rights of gay and transgendered people. Additionally, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June of 2022 by a religiously minded majority on the Supreme Court, Opie's horrifying images of blood spilled in the name of God seem to be inevitably prophetic for the assured loss of women's lives due to reduced access to health care. In an interview with the Financial Times in September 2023, Catherine Opie remarked, saying “I’m not Lewis Hine,” referring to the 20th-century sociologist and photographer whose images of children at work helped bring about laws against child labor. “I’m not going to create social change in my pictures, but I still think I can help to start a conversation.”

Catherine Opie's photograph titled No Apology (June 5, 2021) was taken on June 5, 2021, when the Pope addressed the people in St. Peter's Square for Angelus, which is an important holy day in the Catholic church to celebrate the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. This homily was the first time the Pope spoke to the public after the findings of the mass gravesites in Kamloops, Canada that hit the global news at the end of May. The Pope recites a prayer in Saint Peter's Square every Sunday at midday. He also gives a brief reflection on the Gospel of the day and often comments on some issue of international concern. The Pope's words are broadcast all over the world on radio and television and widely shared on social media. Unfortunately that day, the Pope failed to make any comment or give an apology for the horrific abuses that led to the deaths of native children in Indigenous residential schools in Canada, which the public was expecting (he later did apologize publicly for the Church on July 25th).

The artist's series titled Windows and Walls have a fantastic typological influence, which Catherine Opie has explored numerous times throughout her career, in works such as Being and Having (1991), Portraits (1993-97), Freeways (1994-95), and Mini-malls (1997-98). These series reflect a typological interest and tradition that has formed the basic grounding to much of the artist's production. This approach can be traced from nineteenth-century archival documentation through August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century project – best known for the portraits taken during the Weimar Republic – which Catherine Opie has cited as an influence. August Sander's legacy can be traced in the post-World War I period through Bernd and Hilla Becher's grids of obsolete industrial buildings and to their students, including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff, who have expanded the Bechers' formal rigor to color photography and nonarchitectural subjects.

In the group of twenty Windows, ten of which will be installed in the gallery, Catherine Opie has captured images looking out from every single window in the Vatican Museum onto the city of Rome. The windows evoke a world that can be opened and closed, however, is always tightly framed. While some windows are ornately decorated or look out onto grand vistas of the Eternal City, others are much more humble or include soft skrims which obscure the view almost into abstraction. In Catherine Opie's Walls, the artist produced the works with a panoramic camera turned vertically to reflect the powerful presence of the outer defensive walls of Vatican City, a sovereign entity within the city of Rome; they suggest both the physical and metaphorical fortress of a sometimes oppressive Catholic faith, but are equally a landscape, alive with vegetation that grows freely in the cracks and crevices, a lesson that man cannot suppress nature. 

As the artist detailed in an interview with Cristina Ruiz for The Gentlewoman Magazine, "A lot of my work is about revealing different ideas of systems: either community or identity. But what is identity? And how do we begin to unpack it? And how do we unpack it in relationship to physical structures?"1

Catherine Opie, as a lesbian woman and long-time champion of LGBTQ+ rights has used the power of her lens to create visibility for queer subcultures existing on society's fringes. By cataloging the diverse viewpoints from a single location, Catherine Opie is able to underscore the idea that many of the most harmful viewpoints to herself as a member of the gay community, have been formulated and perpetuated by those who are the least exposed to the outside, modern world.

Catherine Opie had visited Italy previously, but her residency at the American Academy was her first trip to Rome. As an artist interested in the "specificity of identity of place," Catherine Opie planned to formulate how to photograph the Vatican, to "really look at the borders and the boundaries of the Vatican being its own city within a city." Her challenge was to produce images that explore the position of Catholicism in relation to place and history. "My American identity is pretty tied up in my work," Opie remarked at the outset of her time in Rome. "Identity is something that you just don't slap on. You live it, and you look at it. You have to think about it."2 As the American Academy in Rome President, Mark Robbins wrote in the catalog for the group exhibition The Academic Body, held at AAR in 2019:

Photographer Catherine Opie's expansive range of images shows an America that is sometimes hidden, but often in plain sight. She strives to make apparent the things we no longer see in her subjects, whether that subject is surfers, football players, mini-malls, the abstract blues of Lake Michigan, the S&M community, or lesbian couples.

With her work produced during her time in Rome, Catherine Opie applies a distinctly American voice, both artistically and politically, to some of the deepest entrenched concepts of a powerful entity like the Catholic Church. While a physical attack on the inhabitants within Vatican City is far less likely than it would have been 500 years ago, the forces for challenge and change to the power structure have never been more pressing. In many traditionally Catholic-majority regions, such as Europe and parts of Latin America, there has been a decline in regular church attendance and overall participation in recent decades. Factors contributing to this decline include secularization, changing social norms, and a decrease in the influence of religious institutions. Conversely, in Africa and parts of Asia, Catholicism has seen growth due to factors like population growth, missionary efforts, and conversions. While there have been efforts to affect progressive change to the institution, the fact that the growth of the religion is most prominently taking place in areas that have been historically brutally colonized by white Europeans does not bode well for sustained questioning of the assumed power structure of the Catholic Church.

List of notes:

1. Cristina Ruiz, "Catherine Opie: The views and tattoos of the all-American artist," The Gentlewoman, no. 26, Autumn and Winter 2022.

2. Ibid.

Portrait of Catherine Opie

© Catherine Opie

CATHERINE OPIE

Since 2001, Catherine Opie has worked as a tenured Professor of Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and in 2019 became the Endowed Chair of the Department of Art (UCLA). She has exhibited widely in museums and galleries internationally. Her 2008 mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Catherine Opie: American Photographer (2009), was accompanied by a major monograph. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1997), St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2000), the Photographers' Gallery in London, UK (2000), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2002), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2006), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2010), Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (2010), the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA (2011), the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2012), the Julius Shulman Institute, Los Angeles, CA (2013), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2016), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016), MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA (2016, traveled to several institutions), Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo (2017), Centro Internazionale di fotografia, Palermo, Italy (2018), moCa Cleveland, Cleveland, OH (2019), and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia (2023).

Catherine Opie's work is in numerous international public and private collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Collezione Patrizia e Augustino Re Rebaudengo Sandretto, Turin, Italy; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing, China; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Catherine Opie has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship, Photography (2019), Aperture Foundation Award (2018), Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2016), Women's Caucus for Art President's Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009). United States Artists Fellowship (2006), San Francisco Art Institute President's Award for Excellence (2006), Larry Aldrich Award (2004), and the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2003). She has been a professor of fine art at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 2001 and serves on the board of directors of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo 

pederlund.no

Ellsworth Kelly @ Peder Lund, Oslo - "Postcards"

Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards

Peder Lund, Oslo

September 30 – 16 December 2023

Peder Lund takes part in the centennial celebration of the inimitable American artist ELLSWORTH KELLY (1923-2015). With the exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards”, Peder Lund presents an exclusive selection of the artist’s beloved and important production of postcard collages.

On what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday, a year-long celebration showcases the artist’s indelible legacy. This collaborative event includes exhibitions at several museums and galleries across the U.S. and Europe. Peder Lund hosts a unique presentation in concert with the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and its president Jack Shear, as the artist estate’s representative gallery in Scandinavia.

Ellsworth Kelly is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His abstract paintings, sculptures, and prints are masterworks in the exploration of line, form, and color. Presented at Peder Lund, for the first time in Scandinavia, are twenty- two of Kelly's delightful postcard collages — private studies that brim with anarchic humor, surrealistic juxtapositions, and formal virtuosity. Some of these miniature masterpieces served as exploratory musings by the artist while others were used as preparation for larger works in other media. From 1949 to 2005, Kelly made just over 400 postcard works. These show a playful, unbounded space of creative freedom for the artist and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced, and translated the world in his art.

As part of the Ellsworth Kelly Centennial Celebration program, major solo exhibitions are being dedicated to the artist by renowned institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Glenstone Museum, Potomac; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago.

ELLSWORTH KELLY ’s works are owned by many of the major artistic institutions of Western Europe and America, including the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and many others. Additionally, he created numerous important artworks for public spaces. During his lifetime, Kelly was honored with several awards, including the Praemium Imperiale award for painting, which he received in 2000 from the Japan Art Association, the title of Commandeur des Arts des Lettres, which he received in 2009 by the French government and, in 2013, the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Barack Obama.

PEDER LUND GALLERY

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

"Before Tomorrow" Exhibition @ Astrup Fearnley Museum, which celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2023

Before Tomorrow 

Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo

22 June - 8 October 2023

Børre Sæthre 

Installation view, My Private Sky, Astrup Fearnley Museet, 2001 

© Børre Sæthre. Photo: Tore H. Røyneland 

Astrup Fearnley Museum (Museet in Norwegian) is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2023. To mark this significant milestone, the museum is undertaking an extensive exhibition titled Before Tomorrow featuring works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, which fill the museum’s two buildings designed by Renzo Piano.

With more than 100 works on display, Before Tomorrow signals the character of the collection. Alongside recent acquisitions from the past three years, the exhibition will include both iconic and lesser-known works—reflective of the collection’s breadth and scope as well as its evolving identity. The past and the future of the Astrup Fearnley Museet is represented by the collection’s multiple thematic focuses, its surprising and often innovative inclusions, and the sense of curiosity that pervades it. And while several works have dominated the collection’s public perception, Before Tomorrow encourages new readings of these works by presenting them in dialogue with recent acquisitions, lesser-known objects, and major installations that have been restaged from the museum’s previous programming.

The evolving identity of the collection, and how it has been compiled since its founding in the late 1960s, was a catalyst for identifying two particular interpretative lenses that have been used to form this exhibition: the first lens is the notion of temporality. The fact that several works which were created and acquired earlier in the museum’s history, so clearly resonate with the aesthetic, social and political concerns of today, demonstrates how there is a timeless nerve in so many contemporary art works. This certainly rings true for Shirin Neshat’s Fervor from 2001, in which the artist responded to a shifting Iranian identity following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. As this seminal work is reinstalled today, it´s content challenges the perception of progress and asks important questions of our contemporary moment. The building of an art collection requires movement across varied geographic, intellectual and psychological fields, often gathering objects from distinct contexts and presenting them in close proximity to one another. Bringing these objects together, conceptually and materially, is thus a journey on the part of a collector or institution and forms a second interpretative lens. Thomas Struth’s The Art Institute of Chicago II and Nanjing Xi Lu, Shanghai, included in the exhibition, speaks to both of these lenses, at once pointing to distinct geographic, cultural and temporal contexts, while highlighting the very institution into which they are entangled.

Before Tomorrow includes the presentation of several major installations and video works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection. Børre Sæthre’s My Private Sky, first displayed at the museum in 2001 and recently acquired for the collection, was reconstructed. This large scale installation creates an environment that is both seductive and disturbing, drawing inspiration from the history of cinema and the genre of science fiction. Kara Walker’s massive mural THE SOVEREIGN CITIZENS SESQUICENTENNIAL CIVIL WAR CELEBRATION from 2013, was recreated in the museum’s main exhibition space, having recently entered the collection. Following the display of Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde Project (started in 1997) at the Museum of Modern Art in in New York in 2022 as part of his retrospective there, visitors is an opportunity to view a selection of works from this series. Additionally, Allora & Calzadilla’s major installation Clamor (2006), which includes a series of live sonic activations, is presented for the first time since 2009. Among a younger generation of artists, Helen Marten’s Orchids, or a hemispherical bottom (2013), first displayed at the 55th Venice Biennale, is featured in the show, as well as several artists based in Norway. These include Frida Orupabo, Michael Lo Presti and Walter Price.

Artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Janine Antoni, Synnøve Anker Aurdal, Michael Armitage, Vanessa Baird, Matthew Barney, Per Inge Bjørlo, Mark Bradford, Bjørn Carlsen, Paul Chan, Trisha Donnelly, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Nicole Eisenman, Ida Ekblad, Elmgreen & Dragset, Matias Faldbakken, Fischli & Weiss, Georgia Gardner Gray, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Félix González-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Gunnar S. Gundersen, Shilpa Gupta, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, Annika von Hausswolff, Damien Hirst, Sergej Jensen, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Rashid Johnson, Martin Kippenberger, R. B. Kitaj, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, Klara Lidén, Glenn Ligon, Mikael Lo Presti, Ibrahim Mahama, Helen Marten, Paul McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Bjarne Melgaard, Eline Mugaas, Joar Nango, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Albert Oehlen, Frida Orupabo, Laura Owens, Asal Peirovi, Raymond Pettibon, Sigmar Polke, Walter Price, Charles Ray, Jason Rhoades, Torbjørn Rødland, Cinga Samson, Cindy Sherman, Gedi Sibony, Josh Smith, Thomas Struth, Børre Sæthre, Wolfgang Tillmans, Fredrik Værslev, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Christopher Wool, Yang Fudong

Curated by Solveig Øvstebø, Executive Director and Chief Curator, and Owen Martin, Curator.

Astrup Fearnley Museet - AFM

Strandpromenaden 2, 0252 Oslo

www.afmuseet.no

Sadamasa Motonaga @ Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo

Sadamasa Motonaga

Peder Lund, Oslo

Through February 19, 2022

SADAMASA MOTONAGA was born in 1922 in the Mie Prefecture of Japan. In 1955, he became a member of the legendary Gutai group (1954-72), famous for its pioneering performances and innovative methods in the field of painting, sculpture, and installation art. The name of the Gutai group derived from the Japanese word gutaiteki, meaning ‘concrete’ or ‘specific’, and its members aimed to create innovative, peerless art that would be one of its kind. Typical for members of this group, Motonaga’s work can be seen in opposition to the devastation of the war, as he chose to produce joyful paintings, cheerful sculptures, and lively performances.

Sadamasa Motonaga is credited with breaking down the barriers between the genres of manga, graffiti, and fine art, and he was one of the first artists to connect high and low culture in Japan in the late 1950s. His groundbreaking oeuvre was an inspiration for the “Superflat” generation who expanded on his innovative ideas in Japan in the 1990s. His early works share the same vibrant dynamic and energy that are widely praised in the works of his western contemporaries, such as the abstract expressionists Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, and Philip Guston while his late works offer a striking reflection of the emerging global convergence of street art, bad art, and high abstraction as for example found in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Albert Oehlen, and Martin Kippenberger, among others. Parallels to these western counterparts are receiving more focus from curators, scholars, and other art experts; already enjoying legendary status in Asia, appreciation for Sadamasa Motonoga’s work and important place in art history is still on the rise in western circles.

The presented works at Peder Lund were created between 1968–1975 and represent hence one of the most important decades in the artist’s production. Similar works from this period are for example held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. In 1971, Motonaga withdrew from the Gutai group. However, his work ethos and curiosity to explore new methods for his compositions never stopped, and Sadamasa Motonaga worked daily until he died in Kobe, Japan in 2011.

For his outstanding oeuvre, Sadamasa Motonaga was honored with several prestigious honors, including, the Prize for Excellence at the 6th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, 1964; Grand Prix from the Shincho Foundation and the Grand Prix at the 4th International Biennale Exhibition of Prints, Seoul, 1983; Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, 1988; the Japanese Government Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon for academic and artistic achievement, 1991; Osaka Art Prize, 1992; Kobe Shimbun Peace Prize, 1996; and the Culture Merit Award from the Mie Prefecture, 2002.

Many retrospective exhibitions have been dedicated to the artist in Japan, most notably at the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, 1998; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 2003; Nagano Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagano, 2005; and Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Tsu, 2009. In 2015, the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA, organized the first survey of Motonaga’s oeuvre outside Japan, alongside the work of his Gutai colleague Kazuo Shiraga. In the last decades, several retrospectives of the Gutai Art Association have been held at international institutions such as the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, Italy, 1990; Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany, 1991;  Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, 1999; Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, 2010; National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan, 2012; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA, 2013; Musee Soulages, Rodez, France, 2018.

Sadamasa Motonaga’s work is held by several major museums in Japan, as well as renowned institutions abroad such as the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA; Glenstone, Potomac, MD, USA; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

___________

Roni Horn @ Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo - Wits’ End Mash

Roni Horn: Wits’ End Mash

Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo 

Through 27 November 2021

Portrait of Roni Horn photographed by Mario Sorrenti

Photo Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Peder Lund presents a new exhibition by the American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). On display are six fascinating drawings and a fantastic glass sculpture. 

For more than 40 years, Roni Horn has worked with a wide range of media, ranging from photography, drawing, sculptural installations and performance, to artist’s books and text. Roni Horn’s work embodies matters such as the mutable nature of identity and that of the natural world and the relationship between subject and object in the perception of art and nature. Across the multidisciplinary formal approaches, she has employed throughout her oeuvre, Roni Horn has remained focused and her subject matters well articulated.

RONI HORN 

Wits’ End Mash (Rome wasn't built in a day), 2019 (detail)

Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Presented at Peder Lund are six works on paper from Roni Horn's important series Wits’ End Mash (2019). These works are comprised of 75-350 idioms and clichés hand-written by different individuals who were asked to write down their favorite idiomatic expressions. Phrases like “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” “swimming with the fishes” or “lose my head” were then selected by the artist and the original handwritten texts were individually silkscreened on paper into unique clouds of words. Previously, a related body of work, Wits’ End Sampler (2018), was presented at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, TX, USA in 2018/2019. As the curator, Michelle White analyses, the artist’s work “marks moments when language fails and connotation migrates, or when dictionaries and indexes and libraries of water don’t work as empirical fact.” [Michelle white, "RONI HORN WAS HERE," in Roni Horn: Wit's End, Göttingen : Steidl, 2021).

RONI HORN

Installation view, Roni Horn, Wits’ End Mash, 

Peder Lund, Oslo, Norway, 2021

Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Another body of work by the artist that challenges the notion of classification is of course her renowned glass sculptures since glass is neither liquid nor solid, but an amorphous liquid-solid that exists between those two states of matter, with atoms moving too slowly for its condition of constant change to be visible. By virtue of this extraordinary duality, glass is an ideal medium for Roni Horn’s exploration of the shifting grounds of meaning and identity. At display at Peder Lund is the mesmerizing sculptural work, Untitled (“And Chikatilo?’ I ask him.”What was your moment of breakthrough?’ A half lowering of the heavy eyelids, a small sigh. ‘The reek of his breath,’ he replies, after a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Chikatilo ate the private parts of his victims. Over time it effected his digestion.’”), (2013-17). The title quote for this work comes from The Pigeon Tunnel (2016) which comprises a collection of memoirs by the British-Irish novelist John le Carré. This glass sculpture is a prime example from the artist’s oeuvre – similar works are for example held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. 

On 30 September 2021, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has opened a new Scenic Route installation by Ron Horn in Havøysund, Northern Norway. The permanent art installation Untitled (“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness.”), consists of two glass objects from 2013-15, in a wooden pavilion designed by architect Jan Olav Jensen in collaboration with Roni Horn, completed in 2021.

Roni Horn’s numerous solo exhibitions include shows organised by The Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, The Drawing Institute at The Melin Collection, Houston, TX, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. A major retrospective titled Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was organised by Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom and travelled to Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA in 2009/2010. Her work has been exhibited in several Reykjavik venues, as well as in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (1991 and 2004), Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany (1992), Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (1997 and 2003), and Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (1998 and 2014). Roni Horn has received various awards, among them a Ford Foundation grant (1978), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1986, and 1990) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). In 2013, she was awarded the Joan Miró Prize.

Roni Horn’s work is featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA and Tate, London, United Kingdom.   

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

Paul McCarthy @ Peder Lund, Oslo - Painted Pirates Heads

Paul McCarthy: Painted Pirates Heads

Peder Lund, Oslo

Through 5 September 2021

PAUL McCARTHY

Captain Dick Hat, 2010/2017

Courtesy of the artist and Peder Lund  

Photo: Uli Holz

Peder Lund presents nine painted bronze sculptures by one of the most widely influential and important artists of his generation, PAUL McCARTHY (b. 1945). This is the gallery’s second time showing the LA artist’s work. Since the 1960s, Paul McCarthy has worked within a broad range of artistic expressions, spanning media such as video, performance, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Paul McCarthy is often associated with Wiener Actionism and its brutal and relentless expressions, which sought to attack conformism, conservatism, and the contentment of society. He challenges both his own and the audience’s boundaries and invites us to view the ordinary with fresh eyes to discover how illusory and relative our conception of reality is.

These painted pirate sculptures were created as part of the artist’s seminal Caribbean Pirates project, an ongoing endeavor that was realized together with Paul McCarthy’s son Damon McCarthy, with whom he has since produced work regularly. First exhibited in 2005 at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Caribbean Pirates was inspired by the popular ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ attraction in Disneyland, however, predates the major blockbuster movie franchise of the same name that Disney would go on to produce. The McCarthys’ project consists of three large installations, a vast number of drawings and sculptures, several thousand photographs, and many hours of video. Unlike the Disney ride, which offers sanitized depictions of pirates as merry swashbucklers, McCarthy’s version centers on hyper-violent, hyper-sexual antics that are set against a backdrop of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Paul McCarthy critiques Western stereotypes of masculinity by transforming the iconic figure of the pirate through brutal images of debauchery and castration, as well as allegorizes the destruction, plunder, and collateral damage of uncaring and uninformed foreign governments. Through sickening irony, the artist exposes the jingoistic rationalizations and justifications of remote violence that so exemplified the American occupation and which brought about further destabilization to the Middle East. Other fascinating dimensions of this project were prompted by coverage of disasters at sea around the turn of the 21st century; piracy off the Horn of Africa and in the Strait of Malacca; oil spills from tankers and ocean-drilling platforms; and new waves of perilous seaborne migration in the Mediterranean, as well as Paul McCarthy’s personal assessment of the commercial art world at large. The pirate sculptures have never before been shown.

In John C. Welchman's expansive essay for the two-volume artist book, Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Caribbean Pirates, he highlights Paul McCarthy's long-standing fascination with the sea, declaring that he belongs to a group of artists whom the author terms the "marine core". As opposed to numerous Los Angeles based artists who deliberately moved their focus away from the ocean that edges their city, instead preferring to engage with the artificial, superficial, or illusory aspects of "La La Land" - Richard Diebenkorn's boulevards from his Ocean Park series; Ed Ruscha's parking lots and gas stations; John Baldessari's examination of civic and Hollywood self-representations and fantasies - the McCarthys, in Caribbean Pirates, intentionally take up maritime lore and legend in their epic project. It should be noted, of course, that the artist and his son chose to focus their attention on the Caribbean, which is quite distant—geographically, historically, and conceptually—from the Pacific, however, offered them ample space to interrogate what Welchman refers to as the "conjectural relations of 'historical' and contemporary events as well as the allegorical conditions they broker between questions of democracy and anarchy, civil and extra-civil society, discipline and desire, rights and needs."

The centerpiece of the Caribbean Pirates film is an imposing five-meter high pirate ship, Frigate, made of fiberglass. The deck of its brownish-red hull is strewn with objects and smeared with chocolate sauce, ketchup, and fake blood. The Pirate Party videos projected on the walls surrounding the ship reveal the obscene and brutal scenes which took place on board the ship when it was parked in Paul McCarthy's Los Angeles studio. The videos star thirty actors, some of them wearing oversize carnival heads. The actors, with Paul McCarthy in the lead, simulate the invasion of a village, complete with rape, mutilation, violence, and the public sale of women in the village. The parallel with today’s global capitalism and imperialist invasions is striking. The other major set-piece, in addition to Frigate, was House Boat, an actual vessel purchased, rather than constructed, by Damon McCarthy. Originally meant to fit in a niche-like aperture in Frigate and physically prop it up, this plan was quickly abandoned due to its logistical impossibility. The desired, conjoined form, however, can be seen in the sculpture entitled Frigate (2010/2017) which comes in separate pieces of the vessels which, when installed, show the truly desired composition. 

The sculptures presented at Peder Lund comprise mostly of busts created of Paul's head created at the time of performances, first cast in plaster, which is a fast and cheap way of working, allowing for Paul McCarthy to then desecrate and mutilate his form, to then be cast in the final material of bronze. Paul McCarthy created dozens of silicone masks of characters to be used in the performance, as well as traditional prosthetics and even an oversized animatronic, fiberglass head of the famed Captain Morgan. The animatronic head ended up being entirely too heavy for an actor to don, so the artist instead took a life cast of his body, affixed it to the head, and tied the entire monstrous piece to a chair where it was then completely remote controlled. Paul McCarthy often uses references to popular culture figures and advertisements, especially those created by the alcohol and tobacco industries, to tear down the obvious cynicism and hypocrisy in light of their documented targeting of populations most vulnerable to becoming addicted to their products - young people and the under-served, often people of color - who were especially barraged with images of care-free, smiling billboard, magazine, and tv ads in the 1970s through early 2000s.

Central to Paul McCarthy's development for such a wide-ranging project as Caribbean Pirates, are his preparatory drawings, many of which now belong to renowned institutional collections and were integral to the Hammer Museum's recent comprehensive survey of the artist's drawings and works on paper, entitled Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019. The sculpture entitled Captain Dick Hat (2010/2017) was, according to the artist, first conceptualized via the drawing entitled Penis Hat (2001), which is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. According to Welchman, Penis Hat exemplifies Paul McCarthy's careerlong interest in the nature and consequences of excavation and the disposition of downwardness it precipitates. Present in many quite literal variants over the last forty years, the idea of the hole also correlates with several other concerns: boring into and breaking through the surface, ideas of de-hierarchization so often present in the judgment of art in the contemporary market, and the more general concept of a descent into what might "lie beneath" - repressed thoughts, dark memories, and the viscera of the human body. The busts of Hammer Head, Shit Face, and Shit Face Fucked Up are all victims to mutilations - with objects haphazardly, yet violently, punched through orifices and internal organs being yanked out for grotesque display.

Hammer Head, along with Butter Dog, was accessorized with a hat in the distinctive shape of a masterwork of mid-century architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's "temple of the spirit" - the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Often viewed as a pinnacle institutional collection for post-war art, in Paul McCarthy's hands, the stacked cylinders are unsteady, capable of slipping and crashing to the floor at any small disruption. The rough finishing of the enamel paint, which is capable of achieving high-gloss finishes in the works such as Jack or Pot Head, here looks degraded and weathered, as if its most glorious days are behind it. Still considered as an "outsider artist" to many, Paul McCarthy has balked at the commercialization of his art, instead preferring to hold a mirror up to the cannibalizing cycles the art world often demands.

PAUL McCARTHY was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1945, and began his art studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (1966-1968), followed by a BFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (1968-1969), and an MFA in film, video, and art at University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1970-1973). He has been inspirational to several generations of artists and pioneered methods that are fairly common today. His way of creating sculptural video installations out of the sets he used in performance works has been adopted by many others. Artists who have been considered influenced in one way or another include Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades, Jonathan Meese, John Bock, Jake, and Dinos Chapman, to name a few.

Paul McCarthy's work has been shown in major exhibitions at renowned public institutions, including Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); M Woods Museum, Beijing (2018); Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham (2015); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago (2015); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2015); Park Avenue Armory, New York (2013); Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2012); California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2004); and Tate Modern, London (2003). He has participated in many international events, including the Berlin Biennial (2006); SITE Santa Fe (2004); the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001). He will hold a solo exhibition in 2021 at KODE, Bergen. His work is owned by the most prestigious institutions in the world.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, Oslo 0252 

pederlund.no

Sturtevant @ Peder Lund, Oslo

Sturtevant
Peder Lund, Oslo
Through June 20, 2020

Peder Lund presents works from the iconic Warhol Flowers series by the American artist STURTEVANT (1924-2014). Sturtevant created one of the most interesting oeuvres in the 20th century. By following a unique approach that consisted of creating stunning repetitions of the artworks of her contemporaries and presenting them consciously as independent works, she questioned the foundations of our understanding of art and her oeuvre confronts us with a fundamental expansion to Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. The show includes 19 unique works from the 1970s that have never been shown in Scandinavia before.

STURTEVANT

Warhol Flowers, 1970

© Estate Sturtevant, courtesy Peder Lund

STURTEVANT

Warhol Flowers, 1970

© Estate Sturtevant, courtesy Peder Lund

STURTEVANT

Warhol Flowers, 1970

© Estate Sturtevant, courtesy Peder Lund

While some of her repetitions were essentially exact copies of the artworks she chose to work with, others were recreated manually from memory. Through the artistry of Sturtevant’s detailed repetitions, the works she referred to can be easily identified, but their meaning was far from being a simple duplication, as her intention was never to create just a close resemblance, but to explore through her work topics such as authorship, authenticity, and originality. Issues that are of the highest relevance in our digital age, which is defined by the endless stream of images and their recombination.

Starting in the early 1960s, Sturtevant created in half a century an impressive body of work that challenged the viewer to look closely and think about the social and historical context of art. During her lifetime, Sturtevant’s work was met with much resistance and, similar to other great female artists, her oeuvre was only first truly given recognition in the last decades of her life. Sturtevant began her career in New York, where she studied at the Art Students League, an art school that has been historically known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Among the alumni of this school are many artists who became key figures of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, such as Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. This vibrant environment was an important source of inspiration for Sturtevant’s work and some of her fellow students became close friends and sometime collaborators.

Her first solo exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in 1965 featured her versions of artists' works that we now see as icons of their time. It demonstrated her remarkable ability to repeat important artworks shortly after their creation, and it is clear that Sturtevant had a keen sense for quickly analyzing the qualities of an artwork and its cultural reception. Among the exhibited works were, for example, repetitions of Andy Warhol’s silkscreened flowers, which he had only started to produce in 1964 and a colorful, concentric square from Frank Stella's Benjamin Moore series which he had begun in 1961.

While some of her contemporaries were offended, other artists such as Rauschenberg and Warhol encouraged her to create repetitions of their work. Memorably, Warhol replied in an interview, in which he was asked about his process and technique, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine” (B. Arning, “Sturtevant,” Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 2, no. 2, Fall/Winter 1989, p. 43). According to Sturtevant, Warhol had given her full access to his factory and allowed her to use the original silkscreen of his flower series. (Peter Eleey, Sturtevant – Double Trouble, Museum of Modern Art, 2014, p. 73)

Of course, Warhol's oeuvre is especially linked to Sturtevant's work since repetition, authenticity, and authorship are also key elements of his work, however his implementation clearly differed from Sturtevant's pursuit, as his quote perfectly illustrates. While Warhol's factory operated under the premise that he delivered the concept of the work to his assistants, who were then responsible for the work's execution, therefore his name became the brand. Conversely, it was of utmost importance for Sturtevant to execute the work herself. Hence, her flower series, for which she used the same technical tools, demonstrates perfectly that each work will nevertheless differ. In the same way as the products of Warhol's factory are original artworks because of the conceptual idea that lies within them, Sturtevant's works are absolutely unique, exactly because they depict the same thing but with a different meaning.

The fact that Sturtevant, as a woman artist, chose to repeat this particular series by Warhol, a decorative motif which is associated with beauty and femininity and for which he actually used an image of hibiscus flowers first taken by the photographer Patricia Caulfield, is significant. Her choice grappled with the notion that male artists have historically dominated art history and have had much better chances to be taken seriously by exploring and replicating the mundane motifs that Pop Art used. Even though Pop Art has an ironic element, it draws from the visual archive of a commercial culture; most artworks by men of this movement simply repeat the male gaze through which women were objectified - most often by being depicted as either the devoted housewife or a glamorous, seductive pin-up. Of course, female artists worked with this visual vocabulary, as well, and the second series that Sturtevant focused on when repeating Warhol's work used the famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe. The key difference is that the female artists re-appropriated images of their own gender. Hence, most of their works' intention came from a point of feministic empowerment that challenged the given social structures of this time.

Howevere, since her work was, of course, putting key values of the art system in question, many important gallerists, collectors, and curators avoided giving her work the attention it deserved. Considering this hostile climate, it is no surprise that Sturtevant chose to retreat from the art scene in 1974 for over a decade. During this time, appropriation became a widely accepted practice in art, and in hindsight, it is clear that Sturtevant’s work must have had a powerful influence on a younger generation of artists. Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman became, for example, prominent figures of the Picture Generation and explored the constructed nature of images and the parameters that define the social reception of an artwork further.

In 1985, Sturtevant returned to an art world which had, in the time of her absence, slowly evolved, and she continued to repeat the works of the next generation of artists who were on the rise and in 2000, she expanded her methods and began to create new film and video-based works. In Sturtevant's career, her breakthrough came in 2004, with the major solo exhibition The Brutal Truth at The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. After this show, her influence finally began to be widely acknowledged and the demand for her work rose significantly. Many renowned museums started to feature her work prominently, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Serpentine Galleries in London. In 2011, she was honored with the Golden Lion for her lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, and in 2012, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm dedicated the retrospective Image Over Image to the artist. In 2013, she was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany, and in November 2014, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, finally opened the first major institutional exhibition, entiltled Double Trouble, in the US, which travelled in the following year to Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California. Tragically, the artists never got the chance to experience this recognition in her home country in its entirety, as she died in May 2014.

Born in Lakewood, Ohio in 1924 as Elaine Sturtevant, Sturtevant moved to New York in the early 1960s and decided to use only her last name as an artist name. Besides her artistic education, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Iowa, followed by a master’s in the field from Teachers College of Columbia University. Later in her career, she held a professorship at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, Sturtevant died in Paris where she had lived since the beginning of the 1990s at the age of 89.

Works by Sturtevant are held by renowned public and private collections, including ARC, Paris; DAP, Paris; FRAC, Bretagne; MAMCO, Geneva, MOCA Los, Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinault Foundation; Secession, Vienna, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Sintra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Weimar Neues Museum, Weimar; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, ZKM, Karlsruhe.

PEDER LUND
Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo
pederlund.no

Roni Horn @ Peder Lund, Oslo

Roni Horn
Peder Lund, Oslo
Through September 14, 2019

Peder Lund presents a new exhibition by the American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). On display are a delicate gold sculpture and two series of drawings.

For more than thirty years, Roni Horn has worked with a wide range of media, ranging from photography, drawing, sculptural installations and performance, to artist’s books and text. Horn’s work concerns matters such as the mutable nature of identity and that of the natural world, as well as the relationship between subject and object in the perception of art and nature. Across the multidisciplinary formal approaches she has employed throughout her oeuvre, Roni Horn has remained focused and her concepts well-articulated. 

Installed at Peder Lund are four triptychs from her important series Dogs’ Chorus (2016).  In conjunction with the gallery exhibition in Oslo, the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston is currently exhibiting other works from this same series as part of the exhibition Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw, Part II (June 7 – September 1, 2019).  Each drawing is based on the phrase “Let slip the dogs of war” from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) plus a familiar idiom, proverb or metaphor such as “Every Tom, Dick or Harry" or “From the frying pan into the fire.” The artist created each drawing by cutting apart her original drawings of texts and reassembling the fragments. Through Roni Horn’s delicate cut and paste technique the clichés fall apart; the failed communication that is the origin of every conflict explodes colorfully on the paper, transformed into comical and complex, watercolored bubbles of thoughts. Michelle White, the Senior Curator at the Menil Collection, explains that the artist describes her drawings as “a conversation with herself – that points to the mutability of meaning and identity.” 

How language and identity are intertwined is also the focus of the second series of drawings. The work Alias Frieze, v. 1 (2011) consists of 12 drawings in which the words “also known as” are repeated with variations in their order and coloring. The words are arranged in a straight line, causing the different sized frames in which they are presented to go slightly up and down, following symbolically the ever-changing personality that the viewer can associate with the presented pseudonym. 

The scupltural work on display, the gold Double Mobius, v. 2 (2009/2018), references of course, a Mobius strip, a geometrical form that despite appearing to have two sides, only has one. This work is a rare example from the artist’s oeuvre – Roni Horn has produced very few gold sculptures over the course of her long carrier. However, in contrast to her earlier works with this material, such as Gold Field (1980-82) and Paired Gold Mats, for Ross and Felix (1994-95), the two ribbons of thin gold foil comprising Double Mobius, v. 2 are placed at eye level, allowing the viewer to experience the mesmerizing, physical quality of this material up close. 

Roni Horn’s numerous solo exhibitions include shows organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1990); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1993); Kunsthalle Basel and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (1995); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003); and Art Institute of Chicago (2004). A major retrospective titled Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was organised by Tate Modern, London, and travelled to Collection Lambert, Avignon, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009-10). Her work has been exhibited in several Reykjavik venues, as well as in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (1991 and 2004); Documenta 9 (1992), Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003); and Biennale of Sydney (1998 and 2014). Horn has received various awards, among them a Ford Foundation grant (1978), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1986, and 1990) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). In 2013, she was awarded the Joan Miró Prize. Horn’s work is featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Kunsthaus Zürich; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

PEDER LUND
Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo
pederlund.no

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo

Philip Guston - Late Paintings 

Peder Lund, Oslo 

September 20 - November 8, 2014

Peder Lund is proud to announce an exhibition of late paintings by the American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980). Bringing works by Guston to Norway for the first time, Peder Lund exhibits six paintings and two drawings made in the last decade of the painter’s life, two of which are on loan from Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Four of the paintings have been part of the travelling exhibition Philip Guston: Late Works, celebrating the centennial of the artist’s birth, which opened in November, 2013, at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and travelled to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, through August, 2014. 

Philip Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 as the youngest son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, who had fled the pogroms in Odessa, Ukraine. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1919, and Philip Guston began to draw at the age of 14. He earned a scholarship from the Otis Art Institute in 1930, but left the art school after three months and set out as an autodidactic painter, before travelling to Mexico in 1934, where he got involved with the Mexican Mural Movement. Returning to America, Guston left Los Angeles for New York in 1936 and joined the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/ FAP) (1935-43), the visual arts initiative of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, for which Guston made a number of murals on public buildings. A fascination with Italian Medieval and Renaissance artists came to influence Philip Guston’s murals, and the painter further explored this interest when he travelled across Italy, Spain and France between 1948 and 1949. This fascination endured throughout Philip Guston’s oeuvre and came to play a significant part in his late, figurative works.

After leaving the WPA project, Philip Guston began to frequent the vibrant circle of Abstract Expressionists, also known as the New York School that was forming in New York, and he developed close friendships with painters including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, as well as the minimalist composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. Guston almost exclusively produced non-figurative art between 1951 and -54, but the grand narratives about art that the New York School propagated did not interest Guston, and he refused the Formalist theories of Clement Greenberg that coloured the work of the New York School. The return to figuration in Philip Guston’s paintings in the decade that followed famously provoked the New York art scene, and Guston insisted that each of his paintings justified itself and that none of his paintings were part of an overall theoretical scheme. He also dismissed the Modernists’ neglect of the tumultuous external affairs that coloured the political landscape at the time, and stated, “what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going home into my studio to adjust a red to a blue […].”

Philip Guston relocated to the remote Woodstock in upstate New York in 1967, where he frequented other artists and poets and further developed his interest in Renaissance art, as well as the work of painters such as Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Beckmann. These influences now stood alongside an attraction to cartoons and comic strips – the work of the cartoonist George Herriman in particular. Cartoon-like figures and recurring themes such as soles or piles of shoes, people’s heads, boxy cars, self-portraits of the artist smoking, and anthropomorphic figures that Philip Guston called “Hoods” (a reference to Ku Klux Klans men) began to appear in his work, and the blocky shapes and open brushwork seen in his non-figurative period had now become caricatured humans and objects. The paintings on display at Peder Lund show several of the recurring themes in Guston’s late paintings – the “Hoods,” shoes, books, amputated legs and heads with protruding eyes. Guston's late paintings have had an unprecedented impact on artists working from the 1980s and up until the present and have earned Philip Guston the standing as one of the most important painters that reintroduced figuration into painting in the second half of the 20th Century.

Philip Guston’s work has been the subject of a vast number of exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious public institutions. Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Guston, which ran through 2003-04, and travelled from the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Guston’s work is featured in numerous public collections worldwide, including those of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27 - 0252 Oslo 

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Howard Hodgkin @ Peder Lund, Oslo - New Paintings

Howard Hodgkin: New Paintings
Peder Lund, Oslo
October 22, 2011 – November 26, 2011

Peder Lund presents an exhibition of ten new paintings by the British artist HOWARD HODGKIN (1932). The paintings are from the period 2008-2010 and the exhibition is curated by the artist. Howard Hodgkin’s new paintings are characterised by a much looser, more pastose technique. A classic Howard Hodgkin painting, of the kind that secured him international recognition in the 1980s, is relatively small, powerful, composed of dense brushstrokes and stippling, and saturated with intense, bright colours. Paintings from this period were the result of several decades of work with painting and graphics. According to Howard Hodgkin, his paintings are representational, meaning that they are not non-figurative. These are paintings whose forms and colours refer to something beyond their mere presence on the wooden panels they are painted on. They represent, or correspond with, other paintings, and they correspond to emotions experienced in real situations and with memories of those. The paintings are concurrently in dialogue with contemporary art and art history. The freedom and naturalness that we observe in Howard Hodgkin’s latest pictures are the result of over sixty years of artistic practice.

With his characteristic colour-vibrating and pastose paintings, Howard Hodgkin is considered one of the most important living painters. Howard Hodgkin received The Turner Prize in 1985, was knighted in 1992 and was made a Companion of Honour in 2003. His paintings have been exhibited at some of the most influential museum institutions in the world. In 2010-2011 the travelling exhibition Time and Place, 2001-2010 was shown at Modern Art Oxford, De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg and at the San Diego Museum of Art. In 2007, the exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992-2007 was shown at Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven and later at the Fitzwilliam Museum of the University of Cambridge. A large retrospective was held in 2006-2007 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Tate Britain in London and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh exhibited Howard Hodgkin: Large Paintings in 2002 and in 1995 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975-1995.

PEDER LUND
Filipstadveien 5, 0250 Oslo
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