One of Norway’s most celebrated artists, Frans Widerberg, will now exhibit paintings made between 1988 and 2008 at London’s Kings Place Gallery.
Frans Widerberg (born Oslo 1934) is one of those artistic visionaries who creates an alternative world. In his paintings events take place in an empty landscape akin to Lear’s “blasted heath” or Beckett’s existential void. This arena is populated by an extraordinary cast of characters, men, women, sometimes Adam and Eve like in their vulnerability, sometimes violently confronting each other. They are accompanied by winged dogs, bears, snakes – a strange menagerie which has materialised from dreams or nightmares.
In this alternative world the laws of gravity do not apply: figures hover, levitate or swoop and dive. The action is often extreme. Certain themes continue to preoccupy him; the horse and rider is a recurrent motif, instantly summoning Goethe’s ‘Earl King’ to us, while reminding us that Widerberg is the inheritor of Norse legends, as well as the heightened emotionalism of Edvard Munch. The mythic, otherworldly character of these paintings is reinforced by the supernatural light, less Northern than incandescent, in which events take place. Colour, too, is often reduced to saturated, blazing primaries.
In contrast to the riders, who appear to dominate their territory, Widerberg’s other figures in a landscape seem to be isolated outcasts in an after-Eden world, fraught with human fallibility. This is not to say that his vision is remorselessly misanthropic, however. There is, too, a celebration of life and the natural world expressed in brushwork which is freshly minted in its urgency. Frans Widerberg conducts less of an interrogation of appearances than a love-affair with them and with painting itself.
After Eden: Frans Widerberg
Paintings 1988 – 2008
22 May – 17 July
Kings Place Gallery,
Kings Place,
York Way,
London N1 9AG
Monday to Friday 10 am – 6 pm / Saturday and Sunday 11am - 6.30pm
Admission Free
'Horse and Rider', 1989, oil on canvas, 205 x 205cm. Photo: © Frans Widerberg