Throughout her almost forty years as an active visual artist, painting and prints have been Hanne Borchgrevink’s preferred media. In the course of time there has been an increasing concen¬tration in her oeuvre. Her principal subject, the house, has been perfected and reduced to a set of basic forms that are constantly meeting in new ways. Through the repetition of the same motif she has created a framework that makes it possible to work methodically and analytically with the categories colour, surface and perception. At the intersection of the figurative and the abstract she explores the fundamental qualities of the painted surface.
The Festival Exhibition of 2011 consisted exclusively of newly produced works and was the biggest profiling of Hanne Borchgrevink’s artistry to date. For the first time, in addition to paintings and graphic works, Borchgrevink made a number of spatial interventions where a hall was filled entirely with colour surfaces on wall and floor; an ultramarine back wall dominated another hall; and three houses in black-and-white scales were painted directly on the wall in a third room. Through such spatial devices the viewer was surrounded by her analyses of colours and surfaces in a concrete, physical sense.
In this catalogue Hanne Borchgrevink is viewed in the wider context of art theory, in both a national and an international perspective. The catalogue consists of three new texts and reproduces a number of the works from the exhibition. Jan Verwoert describes the actual experience of Borchgrevink’s works, where the colours, the light and time are central elements. Sven-Olov Wallenstein goes into more depth about here use of the house motif, and proble¬matizes this in both art-historical and philosophical perspectives. Cecilie Skeide analyses Borch¬grevink’s oeuvre in relation to central tendencies on the Norwegian art scene.
Published by Bergen Kunsthall, 2011
Editor: Solveig Øvstebø, Solfrid Otterholm, Steinar Sekkingstad
Artist: Hanne Borchgrevink
Texts: Jan Verwoert, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Cecilie Skeide
Design: Blank Blank
Pages: 176
Illustrations: 67
ISBN: 978-82-93101-04-8
Hardcover: 19 × 24 cm
Language: English and Norwegian
Price: EUR 31 / NOK 250