Artist: Susanna Antonsson
Exhibition title: Vårnatt
Venue: Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway
Date: January 26 – February 11, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Hordaland Kunstsenter
A small source of light that repeats throughout the exhibition. A gap, a window or an opening, the bud of a flower. Careful attempts to speak of the unsayable. Solitary objects that move between different darkened and reduced spaces. A pending sense of time and place.
In a series of paintings and sculptures by Susanna Antonsson, returning to familiar objects, patterns and moods becomes a way to wait and linger. When time is progressive in the sense that it rushes towards producing meaning, lingering and waiting becomes impossible. In Vårnatt, the repetition of motifs instead offers an opportunity to return, to submerge. It is an attempt to create stability through consistency.
The paintings we encounter in Vårnatt show stylized motifs on dark backgrounds. Built with several thin layers of paint on small wood panels, subtle shifts of nuances give visibility to qualities that constant thought of reinvention would overshadow. Simple wooden sculptures resembling a modest kind of prayer bench are dispersed through the exhibition space. The benches point to the repetitive nature of the prayer, how it embodies faith through physical structure. They speak of a devotion to something unknown, and how hope can be turned into an insisting.
The spring flower, being the first to burst from the thawing ground, is the only thing revealing a particular shift in time in the exhibition. Appearing each year as a reminder, it circles through our lives as language, decoration, companion, triviality and symbol of both impermanence and renewal. That something is familiar does, however, not mean that it is devoid of secrets. Paintings of windows and small gaps of light provide us with hints of personal mysteries, simultaneously letting in and separating us from the outside world.
Susanna Antonsson (b. 1991, Linköping) is a master student at The Art Academy in Bergen. With painting as her starting point, she works with that which can easily be overlooked, as well as everyday mysteries. She is interested in the connections we have to simple everyday objects, and through painting she tries to investigate dependence and how we relate to our surroundings. Susanna has exhibited at venues such as Knipsu, Tag Team Studio, Joy Forum (Bergen, Norway), and Not Quite (Fengersfors, Sweden).
