Mari Slaattelid

28.02.20 – 19.07.20

The first artist to start off Kunstnernes Hus' 90th anniversary year is Norwegian artist Mari Slaattelid with the exhibition entitled Stempel. Slaattelid has, since the 1990s, been one of the most prominent Norwegian painter, with a sharp eye at painting's possibilities and limitations. The exhibition will present a new body of work produced especially for Kunstnernes Hus, in dialogue with older pieces.

Horizons, silhouettes, the meeting point between earth and sky, constitute both motifs and pretext for Mari Slaattelid's paintings. In combination with a series of sun motifs, we find schematic, horizontal landscape blocks and stripes, so-called "template" works, which have given the exhibition its title (stempel in Norwegian meaning template). For two decades, the template has been a figurehead in Slaattelid's practice. 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. The contradictions are challenged between the conceptual and the expressive, the photographic and the picturesque, the generic and the peculiar.

The presentation at Kunstnernes Hus is a collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall where Slaattelid showed in 2019 during the Bergen Festspill. Both institutions have co-produced the book Templates published in May 2019 (Sternberg Press). The exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus includes selected works from the exhibition in Bergen as well as a new series and older works.

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.