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A Harmonious Balance at the National Museum of Norway
A suite of exhibitions at the Oslo museum explores Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, Indigenous art and the natural world.
“T his summer is very special for us with Rothko, Anna Eva Bergman, Kandinsky and Britta Marakatt-Labba,” says Ingrid Røynesdal, director of the National Museum of Norway, the largest art institution in the Nordic region, which opened in 2022. “This is a statement we’ve been longing for to make a big splash.”
The statement – that male, female, famous and lesser-known artists should all be given equal prominence in a blockbuster summer exhibition programme – is proving exceedingly popular with audiences. The programme touches on the birth of Modernism, the nascent Abstract Expressionism, Indigenous experiences and the distinctly Nordic theme of humanity’s place in the natural world. On the day I visit, the galleries were full. As Røynesdal tells me: “One of the main tasks and main mandates for this institution is to reach out to everyone.”
The exhibitions possess another intriguing aspect: the two globally known figures – Rothko and Kandinsky – are represented in shows that explore small-scale works on paper. Meanwhile, Bergman, a mid-20th-century Norwegian painter, and Marakatt-Labba, a Sámi textile artist from the Swedish part of Sápmi (the Sámi cultural region in the far north of Europe), are represented with monumental and experimental pieces. The works by these trailblazing women are revelatory.
While recognised in her own lifetime (she died in 1987) Bergman’s work was often overshadowed by that of her husband, the German abstract artist painter Hans Hartung. However, Bergman’s reputation was burnished by an expansive retrospective at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 2023. In Oslo, curator Wench Volle has focused on the artist’s large-scale paintings of fjords and forests, mountains and moons.
In the early 1950s through the 1970s, Bergman created her own distinctive artform by “painting” with metal leaf, a practice that brought a spectral quality to her canvases. In shimmering slivers of silver, she captured trees against the night sky and cliffs in the winter. Although Bergman lived in France for much of her career, even at the end of her life, happily settled in Antibes, she acknowledged that she still dreamt of Norway. “It’s the light in the Norwegian landscape that inspires me,” she explained. “An unreal light.”
Bergman’s environmental philosophy is echoed in the enigmatic embroidery of Britta Marakatt-Labba in the neighbouring gallery. In “Moving the Needle,” the Sámi artist brings the Nordic topography and the lives of reindeer herders to a tactile and intricate medium: in minute needlework, she details reindeer antlers and herders’ hats and the troubling outlines of wind turbines. It’s a visual language of folklore and trauma. “Nature is very important to us Sámi people,” explains Marakatt-Labba. “If we just listen, it speaks to us. To be able to work with my images, I have to be out in nature every day.”
Marakatt-Labba’s practice is informed by duodji, the Sámi tradition of handicraft. The result is an instinctive and fluid way of building up a composition with needle and thread. “We have never used sketches to decide what we want to make and sew,” she says. “It is the material itself that leads the way. With sharp stitches you can change your outlook on life.”
Material matters also factor in the Rothko and Kandinsky exhibitions, which both explore the artists intimate engagement with paper. “Rothko: Paintings on Paper” presents 80 works – ranging from early figurative compositions, through experiments in Surrealism to his later, celebrated, fuzzy colour field paintings, including many from the final years of the artist’s life. “Painting on paper, I believe, became a kind of sanctuary for him,” notes curator Øystein Ustvedt.
Meanwhile, in the museum’s prints and drawings gallery, “Kandinsky: Into the Unknown” provides a window on an art historical origin story. Some 40 works, created between 1889 and 1912, highlight Kandinsky’s artistic journey from the folkloric tradition of his native Russia to a form of modern spiritualism – and move to abstraction – shaped by his time in avant-garde Munich, where he relocated in 1896.
The exhibition is a treasure trove of rarely exhibited gems – woodcuts of fairy tale ravens and riders on horseback, photographs, notebooks – all on loan from the Centre Pompidou Collection. “It has been nearly 70 years since the last solo exhibition of Kandinsky in Norway, so without a doubt this is a major event,” states Ingrid Røynesdal.
For the director, the summer exhibitions represent the constant search for equilibrium in programming. Røynesdal took over from the museum’s inaugural director Karin Hindsbo (now the head of Tate Modern in London) less than a year ago and is cogniscent that it is a balancing act. “The theatres in Norway have been doing quite interesting things with making pieces for men, with men, of men,” says Røynesdal. “They saw the numbers: I think 85% of the buyers of tickets for theatre were women. And they said: what do we do?”
But bringing harmony to audiences is nothing new for Røynesdal: she was previously the director of the Oslo Philharmonic. “I love these worlds,” she says. “There are so many more similarities than you would think. It’s all about getting arts out there to an audience with a lot of passion.”
