Set Adrift On A Memory Bliss
Galleri Jessheim / Ullensaker Kunstforening
Jessheim, Norway
2016
Virginia Vargolska on
Set adrift on a memory bliss
In the exhibition Set adrift on a memory bliss, Anders Grønlien shows a selection of recent works that have been realized at several different places in Europe.
Series of silkscreens, paintings, objects and sculptures originate from nature observations and studies from his work stays in places such as Jotunheimen in Norway, Prague, Sumava and Cesky Raj in the Czech Republic, the Los Pedroches Valley and Cordoba in Spain and Paris in France.
Since 2011, Anders Grønlien's artistic activity has shifted to symbolic reproduction of various sources of inspiration. More than being personal observations, the works have deep roots in painting traditions from the 19th and early 20th century with motifs from mythology, folklore and the occult.
The representations in painting, drawing, sculpture, silkscreen printing and combination technique search for an aesthetic expression that freely reproduces a intersection of the various references and sources.
As in romanticism and symbolism, the works are devoted to Platonic idealism. The artist refuses to paint a direct transmission of what he sees and prefers to work from memory and intuition. When landscapes become part of the memory, it mixes with the imagination and is also reflectes a hybrid of different landscapes lodged in memory. Furthermore, like the symbolists, the images are strongly influenced by music, but instead of Wagner, the works connect to current musical genres such as Dark Folk, Shoegaze and Psychedelia.
Anders Grønlien's exploration of mythologies and art history from different cultures is synthesized into archetypal figures, especially one that is also prominent in symbolism; the female figure, symbol of lust, fear, extasy, sexual awakening and death, ambivalent between the hunter and the prey.
The works seek a visual as well as imaginary experience, submerged in a crypto-narrative visual language, as if they were extracts from a hypothetical world outside our own. Paradoxically, the timeless and mysterious expression in the works reflects qualities taken from European art and cultural history from different eras. The individual works can be seen as fragments of a storytelling that is collectively bound together through the works' interaction and the viewer's own ability to associate.