United by their excellent craftmanship, the emotional power of their work, and their visual links to Nordic light, landscape, culture and art history, artists Michael Knud Ross and Jan-Ove Tuv and two other Nordic painters display their art in Washington, D.C., through April 20.
3/8/2007 :: Ross and Tuv, together with Kirstine Reiner and Vaino Kola, share a Nordic temperament and aesthetic that is at times melancholy and lonesome, but is also strong and stubborn. They are interested in the classical concept of beauty, and also in a kind of beauty that describes life and nature in their harsher forms. The four painters in this show can be called realist or figurative painters, but their realism is not rooted in impressionism or the 19th century French academic painting, as so much realist painting is today. They work in the lineage of the Renaissance and the Baroque, and in the Nordic lineage of Axeli Gallen-Kallela, Anders Zorn, Edvard Munch, and some of the National Romantics, who painted emotionally, from experience of life in the Northern climates.
These painters represent differing approaches to realist painting. They come form different regions of the Nordic countries, from different teachers and academic programs, and from different personal experiences. Three of them have lived abroad most of their lives. Michael Knud Ross works on landscapes and narrative scenes on a large scale, painting in a roughly-hewn classic realism, while Jan-Ove Tuv infuses his landscapes and figure compositions with a warm, midsummer light. This exhibition will show a variety of Nordic landscapes, from Iceland’s lava formations to Norway’s sea-battered southern coast to the dark pine forests of eastern Finland.
Ross, a dual Norwegian-American citizen, is the curator of the exhibition and the common link between these four painters. He painted in the studio of Odd Nerdrum alongside Tuv in 2005, where they modeled for each other and developed competitive camraderie. Ross and Reiner know each other from San Francisco, where they met weekly to model for each other and discuss their work. Ross met Kola on a trip to Maine in July 2006, where he instantly identified with the older artist’s work and similar personal history.
In 2005 Ross spent six months in Iceland and Norway studying with well-known painter Odd Nedrum. Two of the paintings he will show are from this time, including the large-scale “Lost at Sea” and “Cloudbreak over Lava fields”.
Similarly, Tuv was also inspired by Nerdrum, having worked as an assistant, collaborator and colleague to the controversial painter for the last ten years. Together they have developed the manifesto of “kitchs painting”, which emphasizes sincerity, beauty, and classical values in painting, and distances itself from modernism, relativism, and the contemporary art world. Tuv has exhibited extensively in Norway and northern Europe. This exhibition will be his United States debut.
WHEN: February 9 - April 20. Opening reception on Feb 9 at 6pm at Hillyer Art Space (Free, no rsvp)
WHERE: International Arts and Artists' Hillyer Art Space, 9 Hillyer Court, NW, Washington, D.C.
INFO: 202-338-0680 or www.artsandartists.org/artspace.html