Exhibition Theme: latitude 59,9
Artists: Madlen Herrström(France) and Marianne Blankenberg(Norway)
Exhibition Opening: 20:00, 12th of Nov, 2011
Exhibition Duration: 12th–28th of Nov, 2011 (Sunday close)
Address: TCG Nordica Gallery, Chuangku(LOFT), Xibalu 101, Kunming
Tel: 0871-4114692
Website: www.tcgnordica.com
Artists statement:
It is from the hikings that we – Marianne Blankenberg and Madlen Herrström – have done together regularely during the years in the Norwegian mountains, that this project has taken form.
We have been working on one hand individually with our personal projects and on the other hand, together on a common project.
Marianne Blankenberg’s plan is to work with bases like the northern light and the norwegian landscape painters from the 18th century.
Madlen Herrström’s idea is to define the inscape with notions of lines that put limits between the fundamental elements water-earth-sky but also on a more metaphysical state.
Our common work is about the manipulated nature contra the non manipulated nature, represented in different scales of Time.
The other parts of our work is developped more freely. The position of the human being in the landscape, the level of the eyes, the hiker’s attitude towards pure nature must be WHOLE. There is the sky, the high skies, the low ones, the earth flat or not, the light, the shadows, mountains, rivers, lakes, seas, snow, rain, sun, heat, cold… The positions in the nature and the human’s position shape the image gotten or created.
We have with the years made sketches, photos, paintings and we have been discussing about what we could create from those hikings. TCG Nordica gives us here the chance to confront our ideas and works and to develop another way of working our art.
Here are the visual thoughts of those axes and their contrary. These make us ask the question of closure facing overture and liberty facing constraint in the nature.
Introduction by Madlen Herrström
Moving the body inside the landscape, becoming the landscape and concentrating the mind makes the brain feel, know and recognize something deep in the layers of life and time. During hiking in nature many views of my vision are like mirrored inside my brain while watching outside. Lines are frontiers between different elements in nature and have aspects in a spiritual sense like matters of inside/outside, of symbolic, of visibility/invisibility, of doubleness and at least but not to forget the limits-lines of laws, geography, politics and history. There is inside a landscape, another landscape. It is secret. It is an invisible landscape.
From those ideas I have developped a serie of photographies for this exhibition concentrating on the line: those pictures have a connection with the world as landscape( the masses of earth, of water, of sky in the norwegian mountains and the constructed nature as the gardens in Versailles) and with the human being (as the head or the body). I have chosen to work photography in black and white and to re-work my pictures in different stages, drawing on them, scrapping on them or using collages, reversing them, working with different layers in the process. When I work in my studio, when I hike in raw pure nature, similar sensations can grow and make me feel in intense meditation, in a space of tranquility, of infinite and peace. It is in those INTERmediary states that I start my work. Like a line in the landscape, motion is slow and low. Words are put as reflection on the sensations, they are mentalised, concrete and abstract at the same time. Here I use some sentences of H.D.Thoreau, an american naturalist, writer and philosofer of the 18th century and with his words -translated in french- draw a labyrinth. I am interested by the position one has as a human being in the landscape : the level of the eyes, the feet on the ground, the movement and the human´s attitude towards the nature. By the human’s position it also means where one stands -latitude, longitude- in the world.
The point is about the line which completes the whole process of THINKING a picture for me. To draw -in one way or another- is to specify an idea, to precise it.
Paris-Kunming November 2011
Introduction by Marianne Blankenberg
I got the idea of the works I am showing in TCG Nordica through hiking in the Norwegian mountains with Madlen Herrström.
I am interested in Norwegian traditional landscape painting from the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19 th century when Norway became an independant country. With my contemporary photographies of the Norwegian nature I want to get into dialogue with paintings made by I.C.Dahl such as ” Bjørk i storm” (” Beerk in tempest”), ”Vinternatt” (”Winternight”) by Harald Solberg and ”Sommernatt”
(” Summernight”) by Eilef Pettersen that I have pictured in black and white and thereafter used the negative of. I have put my contemporary photographies face to face with those negatives. The tree ”Beerk in tempest” is the symbol for Norway´s young nation. It’s negative is facing the picture titled ”22-07-2011”.That day is a peculiar one in Norway, being the day we had a terror in the government quarters in Oslo and a massacre of more than sixty youngsters staying on an island called ” Utøya” outside of Oslo.
With this work I want to show how one can get ideas from elder art and put it in a contemporary context.
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