Underskog

’To see, to refuse to shut one’s eyes, in our time … that is to accuse, to threaten. […] the world is so made that to see is to believe.’
– Nordahl Grieg, Defeat: A Play on the Paris Commune

‘Forms of Modern Life’ considers the process by which the graphic form becomes, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a universal, egalitarian form of expression, moved by both a development of formal and technical concerns and the intention to communicate and to mobilise. The project explores how artists such as Thomas Bewick, Frans Masereel and Albert Jærn in printed form, Hannah Rygen through her tapestries, and Peder Balke and Lars Hertervig in their paintings, employed graphic, figurative forms to address the world in which the lived, picturing their environment and the cultural and political changes of their time, and often trying to intervene in this context by enlightening, mobilising and perhaps also entertaining.

The exhibition explores these graphic forms’ intimate relation to technique: on the one side, how artists such as Bewick, Jærn and Masereel took advantage of technical innovations and new forms of production and distribution to make their work available to those who couldn’t afford costly publications – a part of the population who increasingly emerged as a political force. Following the impulse of print capitalism, these artists created a vernacular that reached audiences whose size was previously unheard of. Bewick’s reflection on the common within his miniature vignettes of landscape and everyday life, Masereel’s direct portrayal of the working class in the modern city, or Jærn’s depiction of the Nazi occupation of Norway combined a critical approach to their own society with a democratising impulse. On the other, some artists recurred to traditional techniques, such as tapestry making in the case of Ryggen and miniature landscape painting in that of Balke and Hertervig, that lay claim to a contrasting model of artistic practice and its publics.

Despite the differences, throughout all these approaches, figuration adopts an eminently tactile and textural approach and a high degree of intimacy, creating a tension between motif and form in order to respond to the dialectic of modern life.

The exhibition includes a collection of books from Thomas Bewick such as British Birds and A General History of Quadrupeds, Albert Jærn’s graphic diary of Nazi occupation in Norway, and Frans Masereel’s Book of the Hours, The City or The Idea. It also includes two tapestries by Hannah Ryggen, and one painting by each Peder Balke and Lars Hertervig.

The core of the exhibition material is part of Guttorm Guttormsgaard’s archive, with additional material from the collection of Kristine Jærn Pilgaard and the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design