Apparently, “museum” has become a dusty moniker. Munch Museum neatly left it out upon moving into its new building a couple of years ago. Now it calls itself Munch – in capital letters – just in case it ever feels like making inroads into markets more lucrative than art tourism. The makeover continued with the appointment of four new heads of department this autumn, all without a hint of art history credentials.
Art historian Ina Blom reacted to the news in a comment on Facebook, drawing parallels to the appointment of Ingrid Røynesdal as director of the National Museum in Oslo before the summer – no art expert either. Blom believes that the two events testify to a decreasing willingness among Norwegian museums to give art historians formal responsibility within their own institutions, which poses a threat to the professional integrity of the nation’s museums. Judging by the media discourse, she is not alone with her concerns.
But this article is supposed to be about the autumn’s exhibitions. Munch Museum still makes them, and the programme doesn’t look shabby at all. Alice Neel (1900–1984) will be featured there from the beginning of September. Neel only gained proper recognition on the American art scene in the last two decades of her life and has, to the best of my knowledge, not been shown in Norway before. She mainly did portraits – often, but not exclusively, of her own circle of friends. The museum suggests these reports from the artist’s meetings with her sitters, which often took place in Neel’s flat, are a way of levelling out differences through the intimate gesture of rendering someone’s image on canvas.
British duo Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, who will be exhibiting at Kunsthall Stavanger later this autumn, also engage social topics through the medium of painting. They have a more impersonal touch than Neel, though, looking specifically to themes such as visibility and the management of public spaces through the reconstruction of charged historical events. However, these paintings, made using the demanding technique of fresco on wood, will not be on show. The venue has opted instead for a sound installation involving found dollhouses as well as a series of etchings depicting moments from the history of conservative British feminism.
Around the same time, Stavanger native Lars Hertervig (1830–1902) will be paired with Peder Balke (1804–1887) and Spanish artist Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1817–1870) at the Stavanger Art Museum under the title Visionary Romantics. The term “visionary” here refers to a shared “loose and experimental way of painting” which signalled the emergence of modernism. The exhibition is created in collaboration with the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, where it was shown earlier this year. Paintings and landscapes will also feature in Andreas Siqueland’s exhibition at Stavanger Art Museum, The Forbidden Forest, for which the artist takes his point of departure in the home of collector Halvdan Hafsten. Siqueland is one of few Norwegian painters I see currently working explicitly with issues of place and context in their practice.
In Oslo, painting seems more concerned with history and surface. Mikael Lo Presti opened his third exhibition at Standard (Oslo) last week, centred on a large number of sober still lifes of oranges. A handful of other exhibitions that have opened in the last couple of weeks can be roughly sorted into this sensualist paradigm, despite strong inherent differences. These include Calle Segelberg’s uncomfortable figures in tempera and dry pastel on crumpled rice paper at Kunstnerforbundet and Erlend Grytbakk Wold’s delicate, Paul Klee-esque watercolours on canvas at Golsa. In September, Tarald Wassvik – himself no stranger to ethereal watercolours – will be featured at Stormen kunst/dájdda in Bodø.
The sensory also takes centre stage later in September when Kvae & Bark (Karoline Sætre and Øyvind Novak Jenssen) bring their gastronomic performance to Young Artists’ Society (UKS). Unlike painting, the meal triggers our base organic impulses, and few areas of human life are at this moment as riven with ideological conflict. With edible creations based on raw materials gathered from “the city’s vegetation,” Kvae & Bark hardly downplay food’s political dimensions.
When the National Museum recently announced a pop-up exhibition with Johannes Høie, I briefly thought it had launched a new focus on younger Norwegian contemporary art (even though Høie’s meticulous allegorical figuration certainly is redolent of the past). However, it turned out to be a stand-alone component of the exhibition Drawn to Life. Works from the time of Bruegel and Rubens. Among the bigger institutions, it is Munch Museum that attends to emergent artists with its ‘Solo Oslo’ series, which now sees Admir Batlak present an exhibition at the “intersection between fashion, sculpture and installation,” kneading together references to social movements and popular culture. Fashion, activism, and consumption – can art get any younger?
It is striking how little attention the National Museum pays to Norwegian contemporary art. Has its pursuit of broad appeal ended in confusion? The museum’s major event this autumn is a comprehensive presentation of the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer (1845–1932) in the Light Hall – definitely worth seeing. The title, Every Atom is Colour, quotes art historian Andreas Aubert writing about Backer’s breakthrough work Blue Interior (1883). Backer is known for interior scenes saturated with colour, but appears to have been a portrait painter first, and the exhibition includes her only (!) self-portrait.
The Henie Onstad Kunstsenter also looks back, if not quite as far. First with Per Barclay, presenting works from his forty-year career, including a new series of photographs based on the artist’s “oil room” at the former Deichman Library. In October, Barclay’s industrial-inspired photo installations will be joined by the rougher surfaces of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s (1930–2017) “groundbreaking sculptures of woven fibres,” which are said to have exerted a great influence on Norwegian textile art in the 1960s and 70s.
Loretta Fahrenholz’s latest film Trash The Musical (2023), a collaboration with actress and performance artist Alicia McDaid, will be shown at Bergen Kunsthall from mid-September. The premise is that McDaid has to clean out the estate of her deceased uncle, who, alongside many other things, also collected art. McDaid & Fahrenholz turn the lack of distinction into an engine propelling a frenetic “post-cinematic collage,” where the sorting job is put on hold indefinitely while McDaid turns her attention to more fun activities such as sharing make-up tips on YouTube and posting dance videos on TikTok.
If you long for an antithesis to the aforementioned Oslo paintings with their tradition-laden sensualism, or to McDaid & Fahrenholz’s wound-up satire, you should visit Kunsthall Trondheim in October. Ever interested in technology and its pitfalls, the venue will present Attention After Technology, an exhibition about algorithms, artificial intelligence, attention economy, perception, and social justice. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Swiss Institute, Tropical Papers, State of Concept Athens, and Art Hub Copenhagen – the latter arranged a symposium on the exhibition’s theme in May – and will probably prove to be this autumn’s most discourse-sated art event on Norwegian soil, to the point of bloating.
Translated from Norwegian.
