når himmelen klarner at CCA Andratx

Artists: Kenneth Alme, Are Blytt, Lina Viste Grønli, Halvor Rønning, Camilla Steinum

Exhibition title: når himmelen klarner

Venue: CCA Andratx, Majorca, Spain

Date: June 28 – September 23, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and CCA Andratx

CCA Andratx is pleased to present the exhibition når himmelen klarner featuring Norwegian artists Kenneth Alme (b. 1981), Are Blytt (b. 1981), Lina Viste Grønli (b. 1976), Halvor Rønning (b. 1984) & Camilla Steinum (b. 1986).

The exhibition has been created for the CCA Kunsthalle and presents, for the first time together, works by these five artists who live in Oslo, Brussels, Berlin and Boston. Invited by Are Blytt, the artists have also been given the opportunity to work in the four studios at CCA Andratx as Artists-in-Residence during the month of June 2018.

Lina Viste Grønli’s artistic concern is with the materialization of language, often realized in her combinations of semiotic sculpture and collage techniques. She investigates the tensions between physical things and abstract systems, drawing from popular culture and everyday objects to propose alternatives and redefinitions. At CCA she has been merging found objects from her immediate surroundings: the courtyard outside her studio and the local supermarket.

In Camilla Steinum’s work we see a series of sculptures, two tongues growing from the same base, curling and twisting as if they are trying to speak or communicate. There are several of them and they are all based on the same premise, but they all move and twirl in different shapes and directions. Cast in silicon with red pigment, making them uncannily lifelike, but still alien and disturbing, they symbolize the meeting of two, with language as the means of communication and the vulnerability connected to this.

Halvor Rønning brings appropriated elements from visual popular culture into abstract paintings, figurative drawings and collages. In the works included for CCA Andratx, he takes on the fundamental ambivalence to both the utopian world of painting and the idealized fictional world communicated through mass-media culture. By using formalism and humorous commentary, Rønning denies any well-defined positions from which to desire or ironize, not giving any superiority over the material, and thus entangling both spectator and artist through repulsion and attraction.

Kenneth Alme’s diptych paintings, two stretched canvases hanging side by side, slightly different sizes, one cotton and one linen, have the fragmentation of history and information as its base. Working with certain ad hoc printing and painting techniques that adds distortion to selected visual material, Alme’s work points to human history and information, and the re-use and recycling of this.

Are Blytt’s work depicts small black sentences on white background, all in capital letters and in the size of A4 sheets on big, free hanging linen canvases. The sentences appear to be small haikus, like EITHER/OR. Inspired by Søren Kierkegaards book Enten-Eller from 1843, it represents two separate life views concerning existential questions and the primal question; how should one live?

-NÅR HIMMELEN KLARNER

The sky and its elements are used as metaphors and symbols for our hopes, dreams and fears about the past, present and future. It is evident in our language, literature, and popular culture, in metaphysics and our daily life.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning

Stale air suffocates

The air was thick with anticipation

Out of the blue

Dark clouds on the horizon

The sky’s the limit

And so on and so forth.

The sky has provided us with signs and omens that help us predict the coming days, weeks and more distant future. For the sailors of old the red morning sun was a sign of the coming storm, meaning action and preparation was needed if disaster was to be avoided. It has also been seen as an omen of war and bloodshed.

On the other hand, the red evening sky has come to symbolize peace and tranquillity, a foretelling of fair weather the following day.

The sky symbolizes the coming times, as in the phrases ‘dark clouds on the horizon,’ ‘the rising sun’ and ‘the rain that washes away.’ We have animated it and provided it with a soul and life, we have given it divine qualities and made it home to (some of) the gods.

We have incorporated it in our universal language to depict our emotions and state of mind, and the interpretation of the sky in its different states is shared by cultures around the globe.

The sky as a metaphor appears in music and works of literature, as in Sonic Youth’s album Bad Moon Rising and Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West. (Interestingly both works were released in 1985 and are themed around the dark sides of American society in the 1980s and 1840s respectively.)

Why do we look to the sky for answers and clues? Is it because it’s so omnipresent, that you can’t really go anywhere without it being there, influencing you? Physically it can burn you and freeze you, it can shower you with rain and isolate you in fog. Mentally it can make you blue or give you spring fever.

It is constantly in our presence, forever changing and still the same, with its sun, its clouds and rain, its wind and heat and cold.

And are there, for this rational civilization that we humans believe we have become, still answers to be found up there? And how is the sky looking now? In this still somewhat new millennium, when so much has already taken place, are the dark clouds in the horizon an omen of dark times, or of the rain that will wash it all away?

-Kenneth Alme

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Lina Viste Grønli, Solán de Cabras, 2018, Bottle, pebbles, silicone glue, 33x9x9cm; Lanjaron, 2018, Bottle, pebbles, silicone glue, 42x16x16cm, Courtesy of the artist and Gaudel de Stampa, Paris

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Are Blytt, Either / Or, 2018 (detail), Acrylic paint on Belgian linen canvas 210x240cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Lina Viste Grønli, Golden Rectangle, 2018, Corn Flakes box, corn flakes, silicone glue, 27x9x19cm; Aquabona, 2018, Bottle, pebbles, silicone glue, 33x9x9cm

Lina Viste Grønli, Golden Rectangle, 2018, Corn Flakes box, corn flakes, silicone glue, 27x9x19cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Are Blytt, Close to the River, 2018, Acrylic paint on Belgian linen canvas 220x214cm; The Benefits of Bankruptcy, 2018, Acrylic paint on Belgian linen canvas 220x214cm

Are Blytt, The Benefits of Bankruptcy, 2018 (detail), Acrylic paint on Belgian linen canvas 220x214cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Kenneth Alme, WAV.es, 2018, Oil, acrylic and primer on polyester, 170×130 cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Lina Viste Grønli, Vichy Catalan, 2018, Bottle, pebbles, silicone glue, 32x10x10cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Camilla Steinum, Vulnerable Lingual, 2018, Silicone, wood stump, 19x15x9cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Halvor Rønning, Untitled, 2018, Pigment, skin glue, acrylic, alcohol based ink and laquer on canvas, 190x148cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca

Kenneth Alme, Untitled (Diptych), 2018, Acrylic, paper and thread on cotton canvas/oil, acrylics and primer on stitched linen canvas, 170×130 cm/160×120 cm

Camilla Steinum, Vulnerable Lingual, 2018, Silicone, wood stump, 18x13x13cm

når himmelen klarner, 2018, exhibition view, CCA Andratx, Majorca