To Make a World
October 7, 2022–January 22, 2023
Artists and sisters Annette Kierulf and Caroline Kierulf have played a major role in revitalizing printmaking in Norway. This autumn KODE Bergen Art Museum launches To Make a World—an extensive exhibition of their work curated in close collaboration with the artists.
Annette Kierulf (b. 1964) and Caroline Kierulf (b. 1968) have worked with woodcuts throughout their careers. The exhibition To Make a World has been conceived as a visual essay—a pictorial world—raising questions about generally held conceptions and topics of debate.
Woodcuts constituted Europe’s first mass media used as a means to spread news, satire, and propaganda, in the form of flyers, catchpenny prints and posters. The Kierulf sisters borrow from this unpretentious aspect, together with references to the medium’s diverse history as an art form. The artists themselves have called their practice “woodcut as cultural critique.”
The artists’ work process is time consuming, using self-carved and meticulously puzzled large woodcut formats, printed in very limited editions. Though often collaborating on exhibitions, they work individually having settled with studios geographically apart: on the rural island of Radøy (Annette) and in the city of Bergen (Caroline). For the exhibition at KODE, they present individual works from their oeuvres sharing a feminist outlook.
Landscapes form a dominant element in the work of Annette Kierulf, and in this respect the question: “What form should a feminist re-reading of the traditional landscape take?”
Caroline Kierulf has explored conventional views of gender. With reference to a women’s magazine from the 1940s to 1960s she questions: “Can we find ourselves reflected in things from the past in a way that allows us to see our present reality more clearly?”
The artists share a keen interest in the mechanisms that govern and shape us as human beings, whether ideological, economic, social, or cultural. But it is we – the viewers – who must draw conclusions and solve the riddles encountered in their pictorial universe.
To Make a World mainly consists of new works of art and is curated by Jorunn Veiteberg in collaboration with Annette Kierulf and Caroline Kierulf. The exhibition is part of KODE’s programme of presentations profiling major artists with links to Western Norway.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication featuring texts by Patricia Berman and Jorunn Veiteberg and an interview with the artists by Lotte Konow Lund.
Notes to editors
The exhibition opens on Friday, October 7 at 7pm in Stenersen, KODE. The artists will be present at the opening.
For further press information, please contact KODE Communications team: Maria Tripodianos, maria.tripodianos [at] kodebergen.no / T +47 414 59 187
