Explore Mari Slaattelid's exhibition
"There is a calling, an intimacy and a psychology in colour and materiality. Working directly with colour is specific to the medium of painting. The content is not revealed in advance, as a circumstance or a relationship that the painter brings forth. It is the choices that I make which create content. It should be discovered there and then, colour against background, and it should always surprise me."
- Mari Slaattelid
Published
The exhibition Template opened in February 2020 in the skylight halls at Kunstnernes Hus with new works by the Norwegian artist Mari Slaattelid. The skylight in the exhibition halls is a premise for the house's architecture and expresses what it is supposed to embody: an optimal space for displaying art, where the light comes from above. For Slaattelid, the naturally lit halls have been an inspiration in the work leading up to the exhibition.
The paintings are shown without any artificial lighting, as the changing incidence of light throughout the day is sufficient and as sparsely lit paintings have an ability to become their own light source.
By removing the focus from the artificially illuminated exhibition wall and leaving the halls in their full height to depend on daylight, the dimensions and the space in one of Norway's most iconic 1930's buildings are highlighted.
Stamped motives and horizontal landscape blocks and stripes are consistent throughout the exhibition. Since 1996, the stamp has been a leitmotif in Slaattelid's art, an emblem for the landscape and the world.
Horizons and silhouettes, the very meeting point between earth and sky, are one of the exhibition's main motifs.
The horizon line is frozen, twisted and turned in a space of depth and surface, illusion and rupture. Slaattelid explores the landscape genre consistently and analytically through a rich, picturesque vocabulary.
Even when the landscape is broken down and transformed into something amorphous, a perception of the world is still recognizable.
Mari Slaattelid (b. 1960) lives and works in Oslo. Selected solo exhibitions include the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery and STANDARD (OSLO). In 2000 she won the first prize in the Carnegie Art Award for Nordic contemporary art. Her work figures in the collections of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), Malmö Art Museum (SE), State Museum of Art (DK), Kiasma Finnish National Gallery (FI), National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, KODE Art Museums and Composer homes, Astrup Fearnley Museum and Stavanger Art Museum.
