Via Norske Fjell del 1, 2019
(via Norwegian Mountains, part 1)
Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, 29.8 — 6.10, 2019.
Imagine that you look through a photo album from your childhood. You flip through the pages and get transported back to places that have a distinct smell and sound, and you remember voices, people and surroundings. It´s not entirely clear whether the memories stem from all the times you´ve looked through the album, or if they go back to the original situations in which the photos were taken. It´s been a long time, and you weren’t very old.
When I look out across the fjord at Stegastein; a dramatic viewpoint along The Norwegian Scenic Routes over the Aurland mountain pass; am I looking at an echo of images from national tv-shows, from landscapes I’ve seen in museums, in history books and in tourist brochures - or do I see nature as it is? And what does that mean -to see nature as it is?
Via Norwegian Mountains, is a series of exhibitions in which I study how I, as an artist and an individual, can translate my experience of the Norwegian nature into paintings.
During a work stay in Iceland a few years ago, I was faced with a landscape so utterly complex and overwhelming that I lost my motivation to paint it. What was the point, when I could just walk around inside it? The experience of the so-called romantic sublime* lead to a sort of painting crisis, which forced me to accept the disappointing fact that a painting can never convey the experience of nature. This period of work lead to the production of many a large and dramatic landscape, which atleast to me, spoke more about the distance that separates humans from nature, rather than how close I got to it.
I imagine that the national romantic painters of the 20th century saw the Norwegian landscape in a similar way to how I experience the Icelandic nature today; as a new, uncanny, unfathomable and overwhelming place, and that these feelings created an acute need to share the experiences with others. The painters traveled alongside land surveyors and mountaineers via Norwegian mountains, and had awe inspiring experiences of untouched nature. Through the paintings, they found a way to express and possibly glorify the memories of the long tumultuous journeys. The paintings were not made on the spot, but were produced from sketches and recollections in studios abroad. People living in the cities and on the continent got presented with pictures of something they had never seen before. The sublime experience thus continued into the gallery, to such an extent that the romantic painting has managed to form a collective idea of what Norwegian nature looks like today, perhaps mainly because it attempted to illustrate a romantic idea of what it is like to stand face to face with a powerful force similar to that which we found in untouched nature.
*) The romantic sublime refers to a realm of experience beyond the measurable that is beyond rational thought, and that arises chiefly from the terrors and awe-inspiring natural phenomena (Greenblatt, Stephen, Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).
Imagine that you look through a photo album from your childhood. You flip through the pages and get transported back to places that have a distinct smell and sound, and you remember voices, people and surroundings. It´s not entirely clear whether the memories stem from all the times you´ve looked through the album, or if they go back to the original situations in which the photos were taken. It´s been a long time, and you weren’t very old.
When I look out across the fjord at Stegastein; a dramatic viewpoint along The Norwegian Scenic Routes over the Aurland mountain pass; am I looking at an echo of images from national tv-shows, from landscapes I’ve seen in museums, in history books and in tourist brochures - or do I see nature as it is? And what does that mean -to see nature as it is?
Via Norwegian Mountains, is a series of exhibitions in which I study how I, as an artist and an individual, can translate my experience of the Norwegian nature into paintings.
During a work stay in Iceland a few years ago, I was faced with a landscape so utterly complex and overwhelming that I lost my motivation to paint it. What was the point, when I could just walk around inside it? The experience of the so-called romantic sublime* lead to a sort of painting crisis, which forced me to accept the disappointing fact that a painting can never convey the experience of nature. This period of work lead to the production of many a large and dramatic landscape, which atleast to me, spoke more about the distance that separates humans from nature, rather than how close I got to it.
I imagine that the national romantic painters of the 20th century saw the Norwegian landscape in a similar way to how I experience the Icelandic nature today; as a new, uncanny, unfathomable and overwhelming place, and that these feelings created an acute need to share the experiences with others. The painters traveled alongside land surveyors and mountaineers via Norwegian mountains, and had awe inspiring experiences of untouched nature. Through the paintings, they found a way to express and possibly glorify the memories of the long tumultuous journeys. The paintings were not made on the spot, but were produced from sketches and recollections in studios abroad. People living in the cities and on the continent got presented with pictures of something they had never seen before. The sublime experience thus continued into the gallery, to such an extent that the romantic painting has managed to form a collective idea of what Norwegian nature looks like today, perhaps mainly because it attempted to illustrate a romantic idea of what it is like to stand face to face with a powerful force similar to that which we found in untouched nature.
*) The romantic sublime refers to a realm of experience beyond the measurable that is beyond rational thought, and that arises chiefly from the terrors and awe-inspiring natural phenomena (Greenblatt, Stephen, Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).
