Marianne Hurum and Marte Eknæs
17.06.15 – 30.08.15
Kunstnernes Hus is pleased to invite you to a new opening for the foyer exhibitions, an exhibition series that began in 2014. This summer, acquaintances are made with two younger Norwegian artists. Marte Eknæs and Marianne Hurum have put together an exhibition consisting of a dozen works based on two complex artist positions that share a number of common areas of interest. In the foyer at Kunstnernes Hus, the collaboration will revolve around a parallel investigation of formal and media-specific issues within painting and sculpture. Through a series of seemingly treacherously simple moves, the artists will complicate the foyer's active and unconventional exhibition space.
About the artists
Marianne Hurum shows a new series of paintings on an existing wall architecture in the foyer. Hurum has previously explored painting's various borderlands by experimenting with different presentation modes and mounting devices, by stretching and manipulating blind frames, and through photograms. Paintings on display at Kunstnernes Hus are full of life; make-up heavy eyes wink at the viewer and a tube-like figuration winds its way across the surface like a Möbius strip without beginning and end.
Eknæs' sculptural voyages of discovery in various materials are attached on the other side to solid ground, on the sandstone columns. If Hurum's paintings can be seen as playing with the idea of a kind of fictional sculpture, we find both painterly and minimal hard-edge qualities in Eknæs' freehand brushed metal plates and soft inflatable floating mattresses that are strung around the stone on the way up the foyer's supporting architectural components. The form has its home in an urban world where architecture is complemented by product aesthetics and graphic design. Eknæs' titles emphasize the indeterminate function of the works, or perhaps indicate a potential in future, possible areas of application.
