Jacob Weidemann
08.04.61 – 30.04.61
The exhibition Jakob Weidemann was shown at Kunstnernes Hus in April 1961. The exhibition contained 58 abstract works by Jakob Weidemann and was part of a two-part exhibition, together with Arnold Haukeland.
Extract from the catalogue
Jakob Weidemann will say of his own painting that it deals with Norwegian nature. He gives nature titles to all his paintings, for example, "Wood Grouse Taking Off", or "Withered Leaves". And the onlooker finds neither leaves nor wood grouse. What is then the meaning of such titles?
Actually Jacob Weidemann's painting deals with colour surfaces of different shapes and sizes. They spread from the four sides of the frame and meet in one or more strange blotches somewhere near the centre of the canvas. These colour surfaces appear to be the result of great work. They are undulating, scraped and rough, and so thickly applied that they crack here and there showing layers of quite different colours underneath. ...... Our eye is therefore led through the painting towards that which the painter wishes to show us. And just this kind of painting will show us nothing more than how a colour is born, how it develops and frees itself from the surrounding colour layers, and how it is in form and limitations. This can only be done with all the possibilities of oil paints, by painting, scraping, rubbing and repainting. And if the whole thing works, and each millimetre of the painting is forced to reveal all imagina able variations, and all the variations are there to support the unity, then the deeply human contents will have found expression.
This art is therefore very ambitious and very humble. Only an interplay of oil-painted surfaces shall be the painting's contents. It will be everything and it will be enough, but the interplay shall reveal the artist's experience.
About the artist
Jakob Weidemann (1923-2001) was a Norwegian painter and illustrator who is considered one of the most important Norwegian modernist painters in the 1950s. He is best known for his geometric, abstract paintings where he used nature as his influence. Weidemann almost lost his sight in an explosion accident, which gave him a completely new perception and relationship with light and nature. This combined with his experience of diversity in the vegetation of the forest floor, and the discovery of the intensity of the flower meadows on the farm where he lived are three important events in his life that helped give him the abstract expression we associate him with today. Weidemann has done a number of decoration works, including at Alf Bjerke's factories, Norsk Hydro and Steinkjær church.
Weidemann is represented by, among others, the Nasjonalmuseet and the Sonia Henies and Niels Onstads Foundations.
