Charlotte Wankel and L’Esprit Nouveau

Charlotte Wankel (1888–1969, Norway) made her appearance in the French art scene both before and after World War I. In the spring of 1910, she was a student of Henri Matisse in Paris, and from 1919 towards the end of the 1920s she lived in the art metropolis. Wankel´s non-figurative and abstract compositions display maturity and constructiveness, and fully express the “L´Esprit Nouveau” that recognized the force and vitality of the 1920s avant-garde art. With her compositions, Wankel contributed to develop a new style: “non-figurative purism.”

Wankel made her debut at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo in 1914, when the feared art critic Jappe Nilssen in the newspaper Dagbladet wrote “there is something to expect in the future from her hand.” She initiated the so-called “scandal exhibition” Eight Scandinavian Painters at Kunsterforbundet in Oslo in 1927, which got a notorious reputation in the press.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Wankel found her own distinguished style. Her many portraits from the 1930s are not only portraits, but also compositions of their own. During the occupation, she was a part of The Retrospective Exhibition of Sculpture and Painting at the National Gallery in Oslo (1940), as well as Art and Non-art (1942), also at the National Gallery, where her paintings were on display to horror and warning in the section for “non-art.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Wankel developed her style to new heights in a switching between non-figurative compositions and abstract expressions.

In 1997 Galleri F 15 hosted the exhibition Charlotte Wankel – An early Norwegian avant-garde artist, also curated by Hilde Mørch. The director at that time Tor Andreas Gitlesen, wrote that Wankel shared faith with so many other female artists of her time. She was overlooked and forgotten. Few people of her own generation understood her art, and few paid her attention for decades to come after her death in 1969. A lot has happened since then and in later years Charlotte Wankel’s impressive oeuvre has been showed in several exhibitions, among them our own Momentum biennial in 2015.

The exhibition is curated by art historian and author Hilde Mørch. Her book Charlotte Wankel and L’Esprit Nouveau. Kambo-Kristiania-Paris-Høvik will be published February 19 at Kunstnerforbundet.

Galleri F 15
The gallery is situated in Moss, 40 minutes away from Oslo. Galleri F 15 boasts a beautiful parkland with view of the Oslo fjord, exhibition spaces housed in a manor building of significance and Café F 15.

The Gallery F 15 is run by Punkt Ø which also runs MOMENTUM – Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway.