Love of the Real is about the poetry of human fragility and courage, and about every day as a new opportunity for trying again. The exhibition presents works by nine Norwegian and international artists.
The exhibited artworks approach a range of different expressions of our behavior in everyday life. Questions raised are about how we relate to “truths” about perfection, and how such “truths” influence our views of each other and ourselves. Intelligently, sensitively and warmly, the individual art works communicate alternatives to “the perfect”, and open up spaces for psychological and existential reflection.
Concepts of value and reality play a central role, but also the concept of feelings ‒ problematic though the word may be in today’s art world. In Love of the Real, feelings are essential. The works are not ironic, and an underlying humor and warmth are present in several of the artworks.
Curator. Maria C. Havstam
Artists:
Heidi Bjørgan (NO b. 1970) investigates the value of difference and imperfection in her installation of two hundred ceramic objects. Strongly inspired by the experimental American ceramicist George Ohr (1857–1918), she focuses on the courage to be present in one’s own.
Andrea Büttner’s (DE b. 1972) film Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia shows us a group of nuns who manage a gambling hall at a small amusement park in Ostia, just outside of Rome. Her work shows an interview that Büttner conducted while she spent time with the nuns in the park. She spoke with them about their work and discussed their attitudes to contemplation, joy, spirituality and value.
Martin Creed (GB b. 1968), the winner of 2001 Turner Prize, is known for an artistic practice of through minimal means investigate everyday realities, and the visible and invisible structures that shapes our lives. Conceptually investigations in his two exhibited artworks relates to feelings, the real and the staged.
Ceal Floyer (GB b. 1972) investigates through Til I Get It Right (2005) tensions between the literary and the everyday. She has adapted the refrain of the classic song by the same name, by sing- songwriter Tammy Wynette (1942-1998), embracing feelings of vulnerability and potential of failure.
Brian Frænde’s (DK b. 1988) photo series Attempts at Finding a System may be understood as a psychological and existential reflection on mental and human processes; on how we are constantly changing in order to exist in a world that is also always changing.
Mette Hellenes (NO b. 1964) is known for her strip Kebbelife,published weekly in Morgenbladet from 2006. The strip is about artist friends Mette and Vanessa. In the new pictures that she exhibits in Love of the Real, Mette is alone. We meet her in a red cabin in the deep forests, straight across the Norwegian-Swedish border. The fear of the black night is overwhelming. Then a new morning arise.
Sofia Hultén (SE b. 1972) works processual and conceptual, often with found objects that initially had a function. She deconstruct and transform the objects by larger or smaller changes of their original form. The sculpture Indecisive Angles (V) disturbs our expectations of a stable origin and causal chain.
Anne Trægde (NO b. 1968) present three-dimensional miniature figures as sketches or editions. Each figure is original, made in an easily modelled paper clay, which she always has at hand. The process is a method for crystallizing thought, for getting as close to thought and emotion as possible.
Iiu Susiraja’s (FI b. 1975) photographic self-portraits slap us hard and straight in the face, as an antithesis to the “brave” new world of success. With her overweight body, she uncovers a bodily condition that contrasts strongly with the feminine ideal.
