About the exhibition Retrospective, 2022
With this exhibition, Trondheim kunstmuseum showcases the art of Hege Lønne, a pioneer in the field of environmental art. In the four decades of her diverse artistic practice, Lønne’s sculptural experiments, subtle animations and poetic observations of nature asked insisting questions about the place of human beings in nature.
Hege Lønne (1961–2018) studied at what is today Trondheim Academy of Fine Art from 1979 to 1984. She then moved to Poland to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She attended the school’s Faculty of Sculpture, which at the time was led by the acclaimed Polish artists Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and Grzegorz Kowalski.
Lønne worked deliberately with sculpture and installation from the very start of her career. Artistically speaking, she was closely linked to Poland from the 1980s up to her death. In her works she combined influence from the Eastern European art scene with Scandinavian traditions and her Norwegian roots. This dual belonging played an important role in both her art and her personal life.
Central to the exhibition are sculptural experiments from the 1980s. During this decade, Lønne made use of industrial materials such as concrete and iron. She tested out various techniques that enabled her to produce the sculptures herself. Important guiding ideas concerned ‘sculpture in the expanded field’, for example module-based elements, process-based performance and installation, kinetic sculpture and impermanent form. Such ideas are particularly manifest in her sculptural performances and explorations of shadows and light, which she documented with the help of photography. ‘Open’ sculptural systems are the starting points for many key works created during her artist residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien – DAAD in Berlin in the early 1990s. In these projects she elaborated on ideas from her time as a student, particularly ideas from Professor Jarnuszkiewicz, and the ‘Open Form’ theory developed by the Polish architect Oscar Hansen. Open Form promotes participation, embraces the notion of art-as-process, and engages the viewer, receiver and user in contrast to the conventional hierarchical relationship between the all-knowing artist and the viewer.
Throughout her career, she experimented with materials, forms and space. Making the production process visible was an important conceptual approach for Lønne. In the 1990s she worked with a series of landscape transformations and module-based terrain transformations that were often executed in plaster. She used such modules to compose spatial landscapes and presented them on pedestals and shelves. Sometimes she included objects in her landscapes, for example, a sleeping bag, a thermos or a postcard with a picture of a Norwegian mountain. In addition to mountains, forest motifs played a key role in her oeuvre.
Starting in the 1990s, Lønne began focusing on ecology – one of the most critical issues of our time. Many of her works address themes relating to the relationship between humans and nature, human intervention in nature, the exploitation of natural resources, global warming and geological processes.
‘Nature sorrow’, ‘ecological sorrow’ and ‘loss of place’ are new concepts that describe people’s awareness of climate change in combination with fear for the future and changes following in the wake of the climate crisis (For greater discussion on ‘nature sorrow’ and related concepts, see, e.g., Arne Johan Vetlesen, The Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2015). Lønne’s focus on ecology resonates with several aspects of the current climate debate. The romanticising of nature’s qualities exists alongside research-based empirical evidence; poetic pathos stands vis-à-vis scientific observation.
In the early 2000s Lønne created a series of short video works, more precisely, animations made with the stop-motion technique. She used simple materials to represent domestic environments and everyday situations – small scenes for interpersonal communication. Lønne also used texts and work titles to introduce humour into several of her works. For example, she placed texts in nature scenes, thus causing the static words to interact with the given setting; textual interventions were laid on top of images of nature and created humorous rifts between the texts and the backgrounds to which they referred. The video works allude to traditions in landscape painting but also have elements of subtle humour.
This thought-provoking use of humour is also present in the works of Hannah Ryggen (1894 - 1970). As part of the Hannah Ryggen Triennale, we have included a work from Hannah Ryggen in the exhibition: Himmelrop 1941. Himmelrop is a relatively new acquisition in Trondheim Kunstmuseum’s collection, and it strikingly comments on Ryggen’s use of sketches. This painting indicates that she worked with sketches to explore different motifs for her monumental tapestries. This contradicts the main narrative of Hannah Ryggen working without preparatory sketches. The motif in Himmelrop is quite mysterious, and further research is needed to unlock its meaning. On the left side, there are references to the African continent, a geographical and political topic Ryggen dealt with in other major tapestries such as Etiopia (1935). The painting’s right side displays a colder environment with what appears to be an igloo and an Inuit man flanked by polar dogs. The middle scene is found in a wooden hut, where a man and a woman are focused on a rectangle apparatus, perhaps a radio. Closer inspection reveals similar black boxes in the African house and Inuit igloo, and all three structures (house/ hut/ igloo) have grey antennas on the roofs. As such, the painting may portray the importance of radio broadcasting in joining people and continents during the time of crisis in the 1940s. Similar constellations of intimate scenes and environments, displayed with a sense of subtle yet critical sense of humour, is also found in Hege Lønne’s animations.
Hege Lønne did not receive the attention she deserved here in Norway. With this extensive presentation of her works, we shed light on an artist who pioneered in focusing attention on the theme of ecology and who tells us something about the complex art scene of the 1980s, ‘90s and early 2000s.
The exhibition Hege Lønne - Retrospective is a joint effort by Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and Trondheim Kunstmuseum. The exhibition was initiated by curators Michał Jachuła and Maria Rubersz at Zachęta together with previous director Hanna Wróblewska and has been two years in the making in dialogue between the two institutions. During this period issues of freedom of expression and art’s autonomy in relation to political authorities have come worryingly to the fore in Poland, following the political appointment of new directors at several art institutions, including Zachęta. This was immediately felt as the new director took office on January 1, 2022 and decided to return the generous EU funding this project had been awarded. The exhibition itself could be carried out with a few minor adjustments, but the extensive program of education and knowledge exchange between our institutions that was a key pillar of the project has had to be scrapped. One cannot but reflect on Hannah Ryggens burning engagement in issues for freedom of speech in relation to what is happening in Poland today. Like in several European nations, the current right-wing government is infiltrating the arts and culture sector. The political placement of directors in art institutions can be seen as part of a wider war waged on the arts by Polish politicians, hoping to infiltrate a progressive sector and bring it into line with their socially conservative values.
About the exhibition Equivalent Forms, 2011
“Equivalent Forms”, Hege Lønne’s individual exhibition presents sculptures and video projections that make up an installation prepared especially for The Biała Gallery.
Equivalent Forms combine the language of nature with the language of art and emphasize the equality of natural and artificial elements representing “the artificiality of nature” and “naturalness of art”. All works presented at the exhibition, carefully prepared both composition and construction-wise, are equally important.
The artist’s latest works, including those that we will see at the exhibition, evolve from her two recent areas of interest. First is the relationship between man and nature and the other, abstract sculpture as an autonomous art form, which brings to minds the international modernism, especially of the 1950s and 60s.
Sculptures, which Hege Lønne has been making since the beginning of her artistic career, use the language of nature, but their form’s primary aim is to express the ideas of the artist. With their shape inviting us to touch them, the sculptures are a reservoir of sensuality and potential for various interpretations, also the ones that will explore the subconscious and refer to intuition rather than reason. The artist uses sculptures, autonomous in form, to build her complex installations, constellations of forms set in time and space, that turn the exhibition into a medium.
When it comes to the form of the exhibition, it refers to the history of exhibition art, especially to the 1960s approach to combine the experimental and classical methods of presenting art. The sculptures are placed on a long platform inside the gallery. Built in the centre, at the whole length of the exhibition room, the platform in a natural way organizes the exhibition space and determines the direction of video projections on the wall, which adds yet another element to the illusion created by the space that enters into a dialogue with the three-dimensional sculptures and the minimalist space arrangement. The character of the exhibition and the way it is presented prove that art can be classical and experimental at the same time and show that the outcome of experimenting with art may be much more interesting than simple imitation of ancient art or sentimentalism.
Two video works with minimal narration that, at first glance, resemble simple photographs, tell a story of nature seen as uncontrolled force full of mysteries and dangers, intriguing and seducing with its beauty. The first shows tall trees reflected in the water and the second a stone wood that leads its own life.
Hege Lønne (born 1961) lives and works in Warsaw. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Kunstakademiet i Trondheim. She works in the field of video, sculpture, installation and textual work. Her works were exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2008); Czarna Gallery, Warsaw (2009); CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2010), among others.
(Text by Michał Jachuła)
About the exhibition Horizon, 2008
The exhibition Horizon, prepared for the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, is a continuation of Hege Lønne’s artistic experiments started in the 1990s. The massive, and delicate at the same time, three-dimensional fragments of mountain landscapes constructed as sculptural forms, arranged in rows or presented on their own, sometimes next to mountain postcards, at other times to daily-life objects, dealt with man’s place in the world. A place determining one’s life, belonging to the given geographical, social or cultural context. At the same time, the natural world within the scope of the artist’s interest is one of the most unpredictable of worlds, governed by its own laws, existing beyond any divisions and patterns established by man trying to find a place for himself in it.
Hege Lønne’s installation, full of dualisms and contradictions, studies the relationships between man and nature. It consists of four video projections and a large sculptural object, a section of a rocky scenery, placed on tall tunnel-like plinth. Situated at eye level, the endless mountain landscape creates the illusion of the skyline, continued in the video projections: in a slowly moving minimalistic landscape and in the film showing a man strolling about the woods. The work’s horizontal part is complemented with two, equally sparse formally, films presented on monitors: a ribbon floating in water, and monstrous, biological-organic structures moving towards the centre of the picture. The spatio-temporal situation arranged within a single room with moving images and an open sculptural form knocks the viewer out of physical balance. All of the work’s different elements are marked by repetitiveness, rhythmic monotony, and a homogenous visual structure. The artist’s installation explores the notion of both spatial and temporal infiniteness, the immense power of nature, and the construction of the world. Each of the installation’s parts is an independent art form able to function on its own. Each of the parts (the videos and the sculpture) can be extended (by looping or adding new ‘modules’) into infinity.
The man appearing in the film is construed as the centre of the world, setting earth in motion, lending rhythm and movement to the cinematic picture, being its driving engine and protagonist at the same time, a force and a small fragment of the universal system of the world. The sense of a slightly slowed-down march adds drama to the film, enhanced by the lack of a soundtrack. The visually appealing, minimalistic scenery composed using the artist’s own technique has in itself an immense power. The tension achieved with the slow movement makes us curious about what this place really is and how it has been created. Even more powerful are the closeup images of roots turning towards themselves and forming an illuminated crevice. The disturbing ‘cosmic’ sound accompanying the images makes one think of life emerging from chaos. The film additionally possesses a kind of botanical appeal, making the viewer familiar with the construction of the organic world. The determinism of natural phenomena is most evident in the black-and-white film showing a ribbon floating in water and forming all kinds of figures a it is pushed and pulled by the current. The film’s helicopter soundtrack, interrupted with pauses lasting a dozen or so seconds, creates a pervasive sense of dread, especially in juxtaposition with the delicateness of the white cloth.
Functioning on many levels, the eponymous Horizon remains open to interpretations, in the context of both nature and man’s place in it. It is an analysis of perceptual phenomena and an attempt to ontologically fathom out the structure of reality.
(Text by Michał Jachuła)
About the exhibition The Revealing of Reality
“Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of sensibility” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Norman Kemp Smith, p. 71, after: http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/), Immanuel Kant wrote in 1781. The next logical step was stating that space contains nothing empirical, that it is located in the subject as its formal quality. This statement had numerous ramifications. It also defined those spheres that had always been the subject of interest for artists. Such as the simple question: what is colour? Kant replied, ‘Colours are not qualities of the bodies to whose visual data they belong, but are also only modifications of the sense of vision, which is in a way stimulated by light’. This means that the viewing subject is stimulated by objects and receives their direct, that is, visual, representation, and therefore nature and the view from the window exist only as a form of external sense. One cannot help but keep returning to this classic idea contained in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when watching Hege Lønne’s films. The whole space of the landscape presented by the artist seems to be a form that comes into existence at the moment of being filmed. It arises in the camera lens as a result of the artist’s sensual contact with reality. Viewing is a closed process here, because the camera and the eyesight of the artist, as she walks around boldly in a circle, initiate reality. The artist knows what she will see before she has even started looking. Everything works like a disturbing mechanism.
One of the films presents someone walking through the woods, guiding the camera lens and making a circle. Trees in the background appear as the camera makes it monotonous turn left, to then disappear from the right edge of the frame. Looking at the repetitive, monotonous panning shots, we are nagged by a question that may prove crucial here: what is reality before the camera captures it? The answer the artist offers is not very consoling. Reality, with its most puzzling area – nature – is an infinitely complex and changing system, from which human eyesight selects only illusory meanings. In the film, reality seems to be a kind of order subject to deterministic repetition.
The world is governed by a logic of consequences producing an overwhelming sense of monotony: the landscape appears before the camera only to disappear a moment later.
There is still another aspect to this revealing of reality by the camera here. In the wordless talk of the simplest events, a simultaneously creative and destructive energy is present. Say, just a walk through the woods. And yet the monotonous rhythm of the steps and the camera’s panning movements make it similar to a celebratory act of creation. The woman walks with solemn dignity – as if she was leading an invisible procession. Every step and every contact of the feet with the forest floor reveal new fragments of nature. Always only fragments. Becoming fully familiar with this mysterious place will never be possible. The ‘visible’ – like the fragments of the woods revealed with the camera – disappears a moment later behind the lens. This situation of creating and destroying reality with the camera is accompanied by a sense, perceptible in the mood of the whole installation, of drama: in the film showing revolving roots, a sense of extreme anxiety and anger is created by expressive light and music.
Another film shows a ribbon floating in a stream. Its movement is chaotic, and yet subject to some repetitive rhythm. The white ribbon’s dance in the foaming current of the stream is disturbed by the sound of a helicopter. Can we interpret it as an indeterminist intervention by man, a creature that has not yielded to nature? One can hardly deny that Hege Lønne’s films show a constant struggle. A constant confrontation between chance and order.
As a result, we are looking at a reality in which some grim determinism prevails. Like the idea of Samuel Beckett’s Vico that all human activity serves a purpose different than the one motivating it; a purpose we can only guess, and which is governed by demiurgical forces. Humanity’s imprisonment in a hellish tube in Beckett’s Le Depeupleur resembles the restricted horizon in Lønne’s film. “Isn’t the same thing happening in macro-scale? Isn’t it the case with life on Earth? Does it not arise and die, and then get reborn, but in a different form? And what does it really mean? That nature is playing a game? Testing its capabilities? Practicing art for art’s sake? Or striving towards something? Perhaps all those creatures summoned into existence served as nothing but necessary chain links along the way…”, Antoni Libera (Libera, 'Wyludniacz w Nowym Jorku’, Dialog no. 5, 2008, p. 70) asks in the context of Beckett’s story.
A surprising attitude towards nature was already present in Hege Lønne’s earlier work, KOM (COME), 2001, which was a verbal encouragement directed towards us by the landscape. The monument word ‘come’ was positioned on the surface of a big lake, beyond which towered monumental hills. And that is perhaps the best key to Hege Lønne’s work: even if civilisation is a source of evil and the primeval state is more perfect than anything else, the artist still attempts to remind the viewer that even in an era of global civilisational threats, they live in a world of fiction. Nature turns out here to be the Freudian ‘fundamental fantasy’, a fantasy providing the necessary coordinates for the creation of desires. However, for fantasy to work, it has to be repressed. KOM, like Hege Lønne’s other works, sends a very perverse message.
(Text by Tomasz Fudala)
The artwork stands alone
What happens to a work of art when the artist passes away? In accordance with the modernist tradition, works of art stand alone the moment they are born in an artist’s studio. They then embark on a long journey out into the world where they ultimately survive their creator. With the work in this exhibition, this has been put to the test. I did not know the artist Hege Lønne (1961-2018), who after her studies at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (1979-1984), moved to Warsaw to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and later, also established herself there. I have become acquainted with Hege Lønne through the curators Michał Jachuła and Maria Rubersz. They were the ones who took the initiative to create this retrospective exhibition about their close friend at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, which took place from 7 October 2021 to 6 February 2022. Hege Lønne - Retrospective is a collaboration with Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.
Together with the artist’s sister, Cecilie Lønne, Jachuła and Rubersz did an immense job of cataloguing, organising and archiving Hege’s work. After the artist’s passing in 2018, Cecilie has been the manager of Hege Lønne’s legacy. The two sisters had a close relationship and Cecilie has been an important source of information about the artist. Through the works – which stand alone – and the people who knew her, Hege Lønne has taken shape here at Trondheim kunstmuseum.
What really happens to an artist’s work when the artist is no longer there? The story of the art is left to the institutions that collect and show the artist’s work. Museums play an important role in establishing and reinforcing the art-historical canon, at the expense of the small and more nuanced narratives. This is a dilemma that art institutions often face. How can a museum succeed in conveying a different kind of narrative, a narrative that is something other than the monumental canon?
Hege Lønne - Retrospective is part of Hannah Ryggen Triennial 2022 framed around the concept of Anti-Monument. Lønne’s art is a good example of the anti-monumental. The exhibition encompasses an oeuvre that spans several decades. Though changing directions along the way, it is possible to follow recurring themes from the beginning of her career until her very last works. These themes extend both outward toward the external world as well as inward, internally toward oneself and the inner logic of art. Viewing Lønne’s art through an external-facing lens that interacts with its own present and the world without, clear common threads can be found throughout the artist’s work – that which is feminist, ecological, minimalist, and conceptual.
Ecology
Environmental crisis is one of the themes in the artist’s time that forms the backdrop for several of her works. It is a profound crisis that has been constantly evolving in the collective consciousness even before Hege Lønne chose to become an artist. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the environmental perspective emerges in Lønne’s art, but even in earlier works such as Landscape with sleeping bag from 1995 – where an ordinary sleeping bag is juxtaposed with a piece of landscape involving nothing more than the ripples of a smooth undulating surface made of aluminum – exploration of modern man’s challenge of finding a place in the world, of finding his way back to an original state in nature, is already present. Portrayals of landscapes in Lønne’s work have often been interpreted as expressions of a poetic longing for nature; a longing for a kind of original state, close to nature; a fantasy of a place before man-made destruction and destructive behaviour – a place where the growing discomfort, unrest, and alienation of our time do not exist. In the video work The Greenhouse Effect (2001/2008) we see a piece of glacier placed on a Euro-pallet that stands and melts while a metronome keeps the beat. The metronome’s persistent ticking recalls that of a clock and the race against time. Time that is running out to save the world. But the metronome does not measure time, it just keeps the beat – an even, laconic, unrelenting ticking.
Fact boxe : Ecology
Land art, also known as jordkunst (Earth art) in the Norwegian context, is closely related to the concept of environmental art – an art genre that encompasses various aspects of the human relationship in conjunction with a specific landscape. The genre has evolved with the evolution of the public discourse; the attention, concepts, and terminology regarding the environment, ecology, and sustainability has been in constant flux in recent decades. These perspectives can have social and political significance. This method of art can be a contribution to the public conversation about the relationship between people and nature, promoting perspectives of a political, economic, social, and philosophical nature.
The Body
The body is a gauge. If one looks at Lønne’s art as something that resonates with and against itself, the inner logic of artistry, then man and the anthropocentric perspective appear as a central turning point for how she sees the world around her. Nature is not directly animated in Lønne, instead the stylized, glossy surface reflects language’s simplification of complex phenomena, such as the concept of nature. The images of nature as they appear in Lønne’s art are observations from a human perspective. Some of her pictures are more anthropomorphic, or human-like, than others, such as plaster sculptures that look like smooth stones, stylized mounds, or possibly forest creatures? Is it the top of a head? Lønne looks at the world at arm’s length, both questioning, imaginative, and at the same time, coldly observing. The works display ambiguity, balancing humour and seriousness, satire and poetry.
Hege Lønne’s own body is itself a gauge we can observe when we look at the sculptures she has created. In contrast to artists who embraced a nominal ‘post-studio practice’ – where pieces of artwork are fabricated by specialized suppliers – it was of great importance to Lønne that she should make her own sculptures. Bearing sacks of cement and plaster up the crooked stairs of her apartment, she constructed her sculptures therein with a distinctive technique that she developed over the years. The sizes of her sculptures were proportioned in such a way as to facilitate her own handling and transportation of them. Shaped with countless hand movements, her forms and sculptures were the result of millions of repetitive manoeuvres. They are expressions of her hand, of the movement of her artist’s body, from the strength of her lifting legs, to the movement of her wrist that knew exactly how much pressure to apply on sandpaper to create the precise curvature she sought. From a feminist perspective, it is interesting to think that the body in Lønne’s art was not primarily a female symbol, an identity marker, but rather a body measured in flesh, bones, and muscles, where its load-bearing and structural properties are central.
Lønne fabricated a series of woven works with green metal ribbon used for flower tying. The first iterations were constructed of a golden metal, documented both by Lønne interiorly, within her studio or apartment, and externally, hanging on trees in the park or in dialogue with the trees. In one picture the artist herself can be seen holding up the woven piece, her gloves barely visible on top of the work while one foot peeps out from below. The woven work leans, like a large heavy body, submitting to gravity, a creature without a skeleton, which floats, sways, as far as it stands – the forces controlling this unknown organism unidentifiable to the onlooker.
Untitled
Resistance to categorization and rigid interpretations is another key characteristic of Lønne’s artistry. She avoided titles; most of her work bearing the generic and non-descriptive inscription of ‘Untitled’. It is easy to imagine that it was something chosen particularly to keep interpretation of her works open. A descriptive title can easily close the reading of a work, or at the very least, limit its understanding to a narrow range of possibilities.
The Untitled (1990) sculptures are a series of small cylinders and cubes in concrete that can be arranged in a variety of ways. The work is open, never adhering to a strict formation, but set up in infinite constellations, yet always remaining itself the same work. With this work, Lønne further developed ideas that she formed during her studies at the academy in Warsaw, especially from Professor Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, and the Open Form theory of Polish architect Oskar Hansen, which Jarnuszkiewicz was preoccupied with. Open Form promotes participation, embraces the art-as-process, and engages the viewer, the recipient, and the user, in lieu of the classical hierarchy between the omniscient artist and the viewer who passively observes.
The year she graduated from the academy in Warsaw, 1986, was also the same year Hege Lønne exhibited at the legendary Galeria Foksal in Warsaw. There she displayed a series of repetitive forms in the manner of pieces arranged on the gallery’s floor. Cylinders and cubes were not exhibited here, rather more organic shapes; shoes or feet, sausage-like configurations, and a relief with an unusual plane-like motif. A reworking of photographs of hair, which Lønne took in 1983, was later translated into sculpture and relief. Unfortunately, these works have not been preserved.
Galeria Foksal was founded in 1966 by a group of artists and art critics in Warsaw. The gallery excels in Polish art history and from the outset, never submitted to the political regime, insisting on showing avant-garde art of the highest international quality even while under difficult political conditions. One of the artists who helped establish Galeria Foksal was the constructivist Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988). It is easy to see the influence of Stażewski in Hege Lønne’s early works in relief. Although it is uncertain whether the two ever met, her square reliefs in cast iron (1986) and concrete (1987) are reminiscent of Stażewski’s constructivist compositions. Stażewski’s paintings analyzed the relationship of figures to their backgrounds and the geometric rhythms of compositions’ structures. Like Stażewski, Lønne explores in her early works the principle of infinite and potential configurations in works that play with the concepts of ‘order’ and ‘chance’.
Fact boxe : Sculpture in the Expanded Field
In 1979, the art theorist Rosalind Krauss published the essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. The essay identified a new chapter in the narrative of modern sculpture, where the pure, strict modernist sculpture was rejected for a postmodernist free use of media and materials. The artist was no longer bound by the conventions associated with sculpture, and was instead now able to use a multitude of different organic and inorganic materials. In the period between 1960 to the ‘80s, a number of artists practiced this new thinking around the medium, and iconic artists such as Joseph Buys and Eva Hesse broke new ground with their works of art.
During the early ‘60s, referring to his minimalist works as ‘specific objects’, Donald Judd presented them in such a way that they could not be neatly classified as either sculpture or painting. It was just form, repeated. Eva Hesse represented with her sculptures a post-minimalist approach, rendered in perishable materials such as rubber, fiberglass and latex, also in repetitive units (Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III).
The expression was completely different from Judd’s nominal specific objects, but common to both is the repetitive form.
In the 1980s, post-minimalism, Arte Povera, and concept art really took root in Norwegian art. At the same time, increased commercialization and the ‘yuppie era’ (the time period in Norwegian society roughly between 1983 to 1987) created the basis for a counterculture that challenged the established concept of art. Perishability is a recurring feature in works from this period, and volatile materials were given priority over durable materials. The experimental and procedural were in focus, as well as the material’s own expressive power itself. The sensory, corporeal experience of the material substance was emphasized, becoming illustrative of many of the works from this period. With Lønne, several examples of these aspects of sculpture in the expanded field can be seen.
Scale
Lønne made a series of works that displayed the inside of rooms in which she has exhibited; Galeria Biała in Lublin (2013), Galeria Foksal in Warsaw (2016), and Boiler Room in Oslo (2014) were recreated in 1:20 scale. The rooms appear as castings, but are made in the same characteristic technique that Lønne developed using a nominal dental plaster, a slightly harder type of plaster that she built up layer by layer, and in that way achieved the effect of marbling. The use of dental material then creates a connection between the body (mouth) and architecture.
Lønne also used plaster to create images of landscapes without a familiar scale and which contain no other characteristics besides undulating formations; is it an idealized landscape or the ripples on the surface of water? The exhibition displayed two sculptures on high, open plinths that depict a horizon. The horizon is a well-known landscape motif evoking associations with dreams and things that lay ‘beyond’, things that can not be reached, but only dreamt about.
The model aircrafts in the kinetic work Untitled (1989) are models of warplanes in 1:72 scale. Though evocative of associations with war, with Lønne they are above all humorous, ceaselessly spinning around their own axes, like the hands of a clock that has forgotten to keep time. The planes were shown in a group exhibition at Trondhjems Kunstforening in 1989 and are reconstructed here and placed in the same room as they were shown at the time.
On the way to the museum on a summer day, you will encounter the text, ‘40 km to glowing mass’, between two arrows pointing downwards, down towards the center of the planet on which you stand, namely, planet Earth. In this work, Hege Lønne zooms out from the microscopic to a cosmic perspective – the earth, as it floats about its galaxy, is a part of an unimaginably expansive universe.
Rythm
Lønne uses repetition in her work to construct patterns and rhythms. She often created two or three similar or near identical works; in this exhibition these works are exhibited in different rooms, in order that the viewer can encounter the same, or almost the same work in different places, in new configurations in relation to other works. This is an exhibition that demands effort from its viewer; short-term memory is drawn upon to recognize, contemplate, hang back and perhaps revisit a space to reobserve a work. In this way, the exhibition becomes a physical experience for the viewer; the act of sensing is a physical experience itself.
Images of forests, trees, and tree trunks are repeated as a rhythmic chorus in several of Lønne’s works. In the video pieces, they occur via the camera’s panning through the forest with people who move as vertical parallels through the landscape and who seemingly merge with the trees.
In this exhibition, repetition is used to put the viewer out of balance and reflects the way in which Hege Lønne destabilized the viewer in previous exhibitions. By juxtaposing different scales against each other, the artist reminds us that perspective affects our way of observing and thinking about the world around us. Within the exhibition we move from the cosmic to the hyper-myopic; in the video Untitled from 2008, we see something that could be details of fluid, sandwiched between two glasses and observed through a microscope. They draw a landscape on an uncertain scale, a kind of stylized terrain formation that slowly rotates around its own axis. Is this the horizon of a tiny planet? Could it be asteroid B612?
Fact box: Video art
Video art can be described as a media-specific art form that was closely linked to television. In Norway, it can be said to have had its heyday in the 1980s to the early 2000s. Artists such as Kristin Bergaust and Morten Børresen were early adopters and experimenters who expeditiously set out to explore the possibilities of video. In the 1980s, most video art was American and critical of a television-consuming society. Having only one state channel, this concern was not as relevant within Norway. At the same time, opportunities to edit films were expensive and reserved almost exclusively for television. The result was often videos that were more of an extension of the artist’s gaze – an exploration of the body in space, that which is physical in the world reproduced and formed with video. Video art was seen as a ‘blank sheet’, an unexplored medium, without history and an established norm (or male-dominated) canon. This may be one of the reasons why the medium became so attractive to some female artists. Although access to, and knowledge of technology improved beyond the 1990s, some of the work made in the 2000s can still be perceived as simple in its expression. Seen from today’s perspective, our interaction with this type of technology has largely become naturalized and mundane. In other words, the distinctive aesthetics we see in video art in the years around the turn of the millennium are a good example that advanced technology is no guarantee of artistic quality. Many interesting works are made by technological beginners or with uncomplicated techniques.
Hannah Ryggen - Celestial Cry
This work is a new purchase for Trondheim kunstmuseum’s collection and is shown here for the first time as part of Hannah Ryggen Triennial 2022. In the museum, Celestial Cry is surrounded by Hege Lønne’s work, which in a multitude of ways, comment on scale and staging. In Hannah Ryggen’s painting we find a composition that could fit a larger, woven work. We currently know little about the history of this work, which is dated at 1941.
Could it be a sketch – an experimental composition of images to be translated into textile? The motif in this painted sketch is odd, and more research is needed to get closer to a more lucid interpretation. On the left we find references to the African continent, an area where Hannah Ryggen followed the political development of, and which she described in the tapestry Ethiopia (1935). To the right of the painting we see a colder climate with what appears to be an igloo, huskies, and an Inuit. In the middle we find a cabin or a small house where a man and a woman are gathered around a rectangular device – is it a radio? If we take a closer look at the igloo and the African hut, similar black boxes appear in each. The roofs of all the structures have gray antennas. Perhaps what Hannah Ryggen is trying to illustrate is the unifying effect of radio and its ability to connect people and continents in a world that was divided by war.
(Text by Marianne Zamecznik, curator)