Howard Kanovitz’s landmark 1966 Jewish Museum solo exhibition is widely deemed to have launched the genre of photorealism.
This book represents the first monograph on modern Norwegian photography from the 1970s to the present. It traces recent developments taking place in the four movements in photography: Subjectivism, Abstraction, Post-Modernism and Photorealism. Subjectivism reigned supreme in Norwegian photography until well into the 1980s. It was rooted in the principles that a photograph could not lie and had to reproduce reality. The early 1990s ushered in the dawn of Post-Modernism in Norwegian art. Photographs were no longer viewed as mirroring reality but rather as works whose meaning was context-related. The result of this shift in focus was an array of new possibilities for expression and new themes.
The present book also shows the influences Norwegian artists and photographers from other countries exerted on each other, a tendency that also shows up in the many Norwegian photographers active internationally. After being overshadowed for decades by other art forms, photography now plays a major role on the international art scene (galleries, art fairs, public institutions, collectors).
Sverre Bjertnæs is considered one of the leading contemporary Norwegian artists today. He himself often refers to his body of works as a fragmented ‘stream of images’ collected from art history, vernacular culture and his own life.
This authoritative monograph on the artist features his oeuvre from the 1990s to the present day, with more than 200 illustrations. The book presents the full range of Bjertnæs’s works, covering painting and drawing as well as sculpture and the tableaux installations he has developed in later years. Bjertnas embraces the conceptual approaches of photorealism as well as merging figurative and abstract painting, and experimenting with the use of new media.
Exhibition at the Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg (NO), 29 April – 8 September 2019.
Text in Norwegian.
Sverre Bjertnæs is considered one of the leading contemporary Norwegian artists today. He himself often refers to his body of works as a fragmented ‘stream of images’ collected from art history, vernacular culture and his own life. This authoritative monograph on the artist features his oeuvre from the 1990s to the present day, with more than 200 illustrations. The book presents the full range of Bjertnæs’s works, covering painting and drawing as well as sculpture and the tableaux installations he has developed in later years. Bjertnas embraces the conceptual approaches of photorealism as well as merging figurative and abstract painting, and experimenting with the use of new media.
Exhibition at the Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg (NO), 29 April – 8 September 2019.
Swiss artist Franz Gertsch, born 1930, is one of the most important exponents of photorealism worldwide. Yet unlike many of his fellow artists, he takes liberties when translating a photograph into one of his large-format paintings or prints, thus animating his depictions of human faces or landscapes.
Rüschegg, created in 1988, represents a landmark in Gertsch’s oeuvre. It is both his first attempt in woodcut for a landscape, and his first large-format work in that genre. Abandoning painting for nearly a decade as of 1986, he developed a special woodcut technique. Having worked in portraiture almost exclusively for many years, Gertsch now begins his exploration of nature.
Starting from a view of his garden in the Swiss village of Rüschegg, Gertsch singles out some of its elements, such as a footpath, rocks, shrubs and trees, grass and leaves, taking them as individual motifs first for woodcuts and later for monumental ‘portraits’ of such pieces of nature. Thus, Rüschegg also stands for Gertsch’s movement away from the representation of humans to that of nature, just as it links his later work with the landscape studies of his early years.
Text in English and German.
Romantic landscape painting and the tradition of recounting fairy tales have their roots in the 19th century. The painter Philipp Fröhlich transposes them to the present. In his works Hansel and Gretel are dressed like people of the 21st century, and his scenes of nature, which are rendered in a style that approaches photorealism, provide a sharp contrast to the anti-modernism that is usually associated with fairy tales. While we were able to identify with the heroes from the picture books of our childhood, the figures in Fröhlich’s art seem eerily removed from us. The canvases are huge and give the impression to viewers that they have become part of the pictures themselves.
Fröhlich studied stage design in Düsseldorf until 2002, and gradually switched from theatre work to painting. But his artistic approach is still influenced by his initial training. Beginning with notes and preparatory studies, Fröhlich develops models, some of which are elaborately designed, to try out the composition of the future picture. The resulting stage-like, almost cinematic quality of his paintings leads to an intriguing mixture of precise, cool realism and soft painterly effects – as if we were gazing into a distorting mirror between reality and fantasy.
Text in English and German.