27.09-19.10.08
FRAMÅT
FRAMÅT *
TOMMA ABTS
HILMA AF KLINT
TORA DALSENG
ANGELA DE LA CRUZ
ELSE LEIRVIK
This exhibition found it’s starting point in the works of Hilma af Klint. Af Klint was a pioneer within abstract painting, although she did not receive her rightful place in history until almost 40 years after her death in 1944. Af Klint was ahead of her time in many aspects, she painted monochromes in 1916, and she made automatist drawings decades before the surrealists.
Like art critic Adrian Searle in The Guardian writes; Artists need a strong belief system of some kind, if not to actually underwrite and justify their art, then to gear up their thinking and to influence the kinds of things they might say and do. Nothing comes out of nothing. Where Hilma af Klint was clearly influenced by occult thinking, the theosophical movement and an imagery similar to the esotheric cosmograms of the 1600s, the inspiration of the contemporary artists in the exhibition comes from diverse sources whether subjective, art historical, personal or obscure. Their visual language is as different, apart from their use of abstraction, being everything from poetical, delicate, hidden, direct, anthropomorphic, sensual, philosophical or almost inaccessibly far-out.
These artists are not walking blindly down a crowded path and living up to expectations. By being consequent over time choosing their own side-track, they make us regard reality from a different angle. The works manage to hold an insistent and absorbed thought. They make us sharpen our perception and consider not only the way we look at art, but at the world as such.
The absence of a self-conscious focus on the artist-subject in the working process is also something that connects these artists. Their work does not seem to be ironic, nor made solely as an artistic product, a result, but out of necessity and a belief in the artworks ability to convey something important with it’s own language.
* The title of the exhibition can be translated as Forward, and is taken from Hilma af Klints series of monochrome watercolours entitled Fysiska planets konvolut; Framåt, Nedåt, tåkaB, Utåt, Uppåt, Innåt
Thank you to Stiftelsen Hilma af Klint by Gustaf af Klint, Greengrassi, Lisson Gallery, Galleri Opdahl and Anders Marius Henriksen
The exhibition is supported by Arts Council Norway / Norsk Kulturråd
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