Mari Slaattelid: Stempel (Templates)

Stempel is a major exhibition consisting mainly of new work by Norwegian artist Mari Slaattelid. This collection of large-scale landscape oil-paintings will extend over both upper gallery spaces at Kunstnernes Hus. It will also include a work designed especially for the spaces, painted directly onto the wall and covering its full height. 

“Colour and material have a particular appeal, an intimacy and a psychology. The ability to work with pure colour is specific to painting. The content is not decided in advance, like a subject or a relationship that I wish to raise. The choices I make while working are the content in themselves. The work needs to be invented then and there, colour against background, and I myself need to be surprised by the work.”
-Mari Slaattelid

The skylights, a signature feature of Kunstnernes Hus’s architecture, have inspired and shaped the work that has gone into this exhibition. Slaattelid makes full use of these iconic rooms’ dimensions and characteristics. The new paintings are powerful and precise, whether strongly chromatic or muted in tone. Horizons and silhouettes, the meeting point of earth and sky, are some of the show’s key motifs. The horizon line is frozen, twisted and inverted in a play-off between subject and texture as well as depth and surface. There is a distinct conceptualism underpinning these works that Slaattelid refers to as her “templates”: the idea of landscape painting as viewpoint and distant prospect is replaced by amorphous or rectangular blocks and stripes. 

A series of images of the sun reduced to a logo-like simplicity are linked to a monumental sunbeam imprint painted directly onto the end wall of the left-hand gallery. We are presented with a simulation of how the sunlight might stream in through the roof skylights of Kunstnernes Hus on a late afternoon in February. The exhibition will be shown with no artificial lighting and the works will simply be revealed by the changing natural light as the day unfolds. 

Mari Slaattelid has, since the late 90s, become established as one of Norway’s best-known artists, with an exceptional feel for the possibilities and boundaries of painting. Her work ranges from the conceptual to the expressionist, the photographic and the painterly; both figurative and abstract. 

In 2019 Slaattelid was the featured artist at the Bergen Festspillene, and her exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus is a collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall. Both institutions have co-produced a book, Templates, published in May 2019 by the German publishing house Sternberg Press.

Mari Slaattelid (b. 1960, lives and works in Oslo) has had solo exhibitions at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway’s National Gallery, Bergen Kunsthall and other museums and galleries in Norway and the Nordic countries. In 2000 she won first prize at the Carnegie Art Award for Northern Contemporary Art. Her work has been acquired by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), Statens Museum for Kunst (DK), Malmö Konstmuseum (SE), Kiasma Finnish National Gallery (FI), Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, KODE (Kunstmuseer og Komponisthjem, Bergen), Astrup Fearnley Museet, Drammens Museum and Stavanger Kunstmuseum. Slaattelid is represented by STANDARD (OSLO).

Kunstnernes Hus cordially invites to the opening on February 28 at 7pm.
Further program and artist talk will be announced on kunstnerneshus.no

The exhibition is supported by Sparebankstiftelsen, Arts Council Norway, The Association of Norwegian Visual Artists, Fritt Ord, The City of Oslo and architect Knut Hjeltnes.