The first – and, for the foreseeable future, only – exhibition in the National Museum of Norway’s Light Hall dedicated to a Norwegian contemporary artist has opened, and the spotlight is firmly on A K Dolven. For her retrospective, the artist has been granted the museum’s grand ballroom. This invites expectations that the exhibition must be something truly significant, which, of course, it is not by default. The artist selected for this role may come across as having been chosen somewhat arbitrarily from a pool of qualified candidates. In this case, the absence of mid-career exhibitions is particularly conspicuous. Still, many would argue that a major retrospective for Dolven on her home turf is long overdue, given her impressive track record since the late 1980s, not least internationally.
Visitors are, as the show’s title suggests, granted an audience with an Amazon warrior. This martial and sovereign premise positions the artwork as a sensory experience, one that overwhelms primarily through feeling, while acknowledging the fragile yet grand nature of human life. The exhibition includes around eighty paintings, sculptures, video installations, film projections, sound works, and text-based pieces from the past four decades. Despite the variety of media, Dolven’s practice revolves around a fairly consistent formula in which formal restraint is combined with airy existential reflection. A recurring motif is women in tandem with the forces of nature as they unfold with both violence and magic in the serene landscape of Lofoten, the artist’s long-time base after years spent in Berlin and London.
To begin with, A K Dolven. amazon inadvertently highlights the shortcomings of the Light Hall. In the past, exhibition architects have gone to great lengths to downplay the space’s monumental scale, constructing all manner of corridors and partitions to create quasi-historical cabinets and salons. These interventions have consistently appeared in tension with the actual architecture. The museum’s architect, Klaus Schuwerk, envisioned classical purity and uninterrupted volume – a vision now condemned to ongoing negotiation, arguably ever since the originally planned elevated alabaster was scrapped.
The full length of the exhibition space is put to use, signalled by the very first works visitors encounter on the wall opposite the staircase: the strikingly tall (5 metres) and narrow (1.25 metres) this is a tall political painting and this is a tall black political painting (both 2019–2024). Each work is composed of the artist’s fingerprints rendered as coloured dots in faint lines. The devil-may-care fingerprint is directly inspired by a similar one in red in a late self-portrait by the Finnish-Swedish painter Helene Schjerfbeck. One of the few walls in the exhibition space presents a salonfähig constellation, primarily of paintings, which, despite their considerable dimensions, appear reduced, almost tiny. At the same time, the Light Hall’s strict lines and clinical atmosphere underscore just how challenging it is to generate ambience and internal coherence in this space at the top of the museum. It easily feels as though you have arrived at an airport, where everything is in transit. In theory, these cool, functional surroundings suit Dolven’s minimalist visual language very well. But in practice, the pieces, viewed in this light, can come across as exposed, stripped down both formally and as meaning-bearing objects.
The staging is strict, with the result that the art feels overly placed. In turn, the works on view lose some of their resonance – perhaps even their potential to move us. The most striking curatorial intervention is a glass corridor that runs as a self-conscious passage through the exhibition space and brings together several smaller works. The transparency of the structure allows visitors to study the backs of paintings, but also to gaze at other visitors through the glass, like dazed circus animals. A series of smaller video screens runs alongside the corridor, displaying abstracted forms and movements, both cosmically suggestive and tightly zoomed in – for instance, on the artist’s own globe-like eye. Opposite is a selection of Dolven’s notebooks. While it can be intriguing to get a peek into an artist’s creative process, these notebooks obviously do not quite operate on the level of fully realised artworks. In this context, the canonisation of casual sketches and passing thoughts comes across as unnecessarily self-mythologising. They are better suited to the catalogue, which offers a rich introduction to Dolven’s practice through both new and previously published texts alongside an extensive visual survey.
The exhibition makes tangible the force and determination – you might call it integrity – in Dolven’s practice. The obvious limitation, however, is that the artworks tend to revolve around the artist’s own persona, an impression reinforced by the omnipresence of her handwriting, which proclaims earnest intentions. This tendency inevitably veers towards the banal and the pompous, in what is often a precarious balancing act between everything and nothing, ceremony and triviality. But then, no one ever said that the banal cannot contain truth, and allergy to all forms of pathos may well be exaggerated. At the same time, one has to accept that the artist paints with broad strokes and communicates on an intimate frequency, a combination that limits the viewer’s interpretive freedom.
In several works, Dolven makes use of Fauske marble. This Arctic, time-bearing material, with its lyrical and sublime pink veining, resembles a kind of Northern Norwegian Baroque. In the video installation moving mountain (2004), presented in a box with sloping walls and a gleaming white background, we see two heads from behind, with long blonde and brown hair respectively. The women stand transfixed before a misty scene – a cliff teeming with seabirds – pierced by the grating sound of birds. From time to time, they exchange glances, as if sharing a secret. In the video work ahead (2008), projected onto a large surface tilted against the wall, we witness an inscrutable rescue mission in which a young woman is pulled up a snow-covered slope by a team fumbling through the whiteness. Such poetic imagery is in no short supply throughout the exhibition. The idea of transience is once again evoked in the video/sound work vertical on my own (2011), screened on the physical end wall of the exhibition. The elongated vertical format seen in the opening paintings is here turned on its side. A thin strip of shadow, dramatically stretched by the winter sun, runs the length of the wall, and is accompanied by strained, crackling human sounds. The shadow appears steadfast and defiant against the cold backdrop, signalling a certain endurance.
Bright whiteness is also a recurring element in a series of eight paintings titled can women think (2003–2004), executed in oil on aluminium. When viewed over time, the entirely white surfaces allow various geometric forms to emerge and flicker across the surface, including intersecting vertical and horizontal lines and swelling circular figures. Such illusory effects, where the eye determines whether something is present or not, echo the unresolved question in the title. The woman Dolven invokes is clearly sensing, but is she also thinking, tongue in cheek? The resonance between women and nature that Dolven suggests in other works is at play here too. I can’t quite grasp what the feminine specifically refers to in this case. Is it a kind of assumed sensitivity? In any event, Dolven places her trust in the viewer’s sustained attention, where your gaze ideally enters an optical collaboration with her invested surfaces.
The depiction of female mythology and archetypes reaches its peak in the 16mm film amazon (2005), which, by lending its title to the exhibition, also becomes something of a figurehead. The amazon is an androgynous figure from Greek mythology, with one breast removed to more easily draw the bow. Apart from the whir of the projector, the film is silent, yet it is sharply and rhythmically edited. The arrow is released towards an unknown target. The work carries an undeniable and tightly controlled force, with an appealing sense of rhythm. Still, I find the exhibition most compelling when Dolven steps outside the Light Hall. Two works are shown in the galleries housing the museum’s collection. Among them is to you 1994–2018 (1994–2018), a video of a young girl standing on a block of marble in the wilderness, striking dance-like poses. The video is presented on a screen in an nondescript space, alongside classical sculpture. Other artworks are in the library, in the cloakroom, on the roof, and just outside the museum. Here, the pieces have more to respond to – more circulation, more air, and less of the pathos-imposing atmosphere.
The exhibition includes several paraphrases in which Dolven reworks Edvard Munch’s pictorial space by filming some of his most iconic motifs, introducing movement, music, and other cues referencing contemporary times. The most striking is portrait with cigarette (2000), casually installed in the cloakroom as a light-footed aside. A young girl gazes calmly into the space before her, a smoking cigarette in hand, burning for exactly as long as the video lasts. The girl, the artist’s daughter Thora – now an artist in her own right – becomes a conduit through which Munch’s fin-de-siècle sensibility is fused with contemporary self-staging. Dolven’s remix of gender also serves as a defining factor. It is stylised, distilled, and easy to read, as is often the case with Dolven’s works. Yet here the work is more rhythmically playful and wry in its handling of inherited archetypes.
Translated by Marie-Alix Isdahl
