Archive - Kunst fra Verftet
Kunst fra USF Verftet
Work by
Egil Røed
Kari Hjertholm
Sissel Blystad
Elke Karnik
Torill Nøst
Ingrid Berven
Brit Bøhme and Laila Aas Birkeland
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15.07.2011-15.08.2011 // Opening Friday 15.07.2011 // 1900
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Bøhme/Birkeland, Untitled, 1991
USF Verftet has since 1985 housed artists from different generations, techniques and expressions. In this second exhibition with artists that work at USF Verftet, the aim is showing USF as a place of continuous production. The works presented are made between 1966 and 2006, and hence represent a history that predates- and follows the evolution of USF Verftet as a place of artistic production.
USF Verftet houses artists from widely different artistic genre and techniques. The oldest works in the exhibition are by Egil Røed. Some of these collages were part of the seminal and infamous exhibition Gruppe 66 (Group 66) in Berge Fine Art Society in 1966. This exhibition was a break with the Fine art Society’s bourgeois format and introduced to Bergen a radically new way of defining art, how art is mediated and exhibited that still has relevancy for today’s art and artists.
Ingrid Bervens Natt/Verden represents a willingness t say something profound about the world we live in through a sculptural format. Laila Aas Birkeland and Brit Bøhmes painting Untitled, 1991, mirrors the formal nerve that embodies Bervens installation. Bøhme/Birkelands painting is related to a modern minimal tradition, and less related to the post-modern trans media generation that Berven is a part of.
Sissel Blystad shows her weave Untitled from 1977. The weave is a minimal landscape that simultaneously shows the start of Blystads formal and coloristic experiments that were to come later in her career. There is seemingly a giant leap from Blystads minimal landscapes to Kari Hjertholms expressive pictorial weave Strømning (Current), 2006. The technique she uses lets her create complex dynamics with a basic weaving technique. The result is a dynamic and at the same time subtly composed image that reveals inner angst and depth.
Torill Nøsts installation Naeem (1997) consists of photographs that are both portraits and non-portraits. The anonymous male person in the images faces away from you, gazing into a darkness that is the same darkness the spectator is forced to relate to. Nøsts photographs are accompanied by a sculptural element; a stylized spear made from stainless steal. Whether the combination of photographs and the sculpture is an image of a male experience, the athlete/hunter that gaze towards a nameless past or a future devoid of meaning, is a question left open to the viewer. In Elke Karniks video Never Judge a Man by his Umbrella (2004) has, like Nøsts installation, there is a seemingly harmless object that at any given time can turn into a weapon. Karniks umbrella is a bird like monster that threatens and then attacks a stylized male figure in a way that gives associations to Alfred Hitchcocks movie The Birds.