Season XXVII- Ann Beate Tempelhaug, Nord, Solo Show
8.9 – 19.11.2023
Opening 7.9.2023, 18-21.00 – Press Preview 14-17.00
Sunday Brunch 10.9.2023, 12-18.00
In the presence of the artist, during Brussels Gallery Weekend
Download the invitation here
Download the press release in FR & in EN
Download the catalogue here
__
WE, we waves,
That are rocking the winds
To rest—
Green cradles, we waves!
Wet are we, and salty;
Leap like flames of fire—
Wet flames are we:
Burning, extinguishing;
Cleansing, replenishing;
Bearing, engendering.
We, we waves,
That are rocking the winds
To rest!
__ We waves, August Strindberg
This first solo show by Norwegian artist Ann Beate Tempelhaug at Spazio Nobile Gallery opens a new chapter in the artist’s career that has spanned over forty years. The gallery is presenting a series of some fifteen new works painted in / on life-sized ceramic objects, strong and vivid immersions that call for subtle feelings and visually tactile sensations.
Her freely shaped and sculpted ceramic pieces are entirely hand-painted, both on their surface and on their edges, reflecting her curiosity and desire to investigate the duality of beauty and the meaning of life through colours and shapes.
She pushes the limits inherent to ceramics as a medium of creation, and challenges format and weight to reach the feasible in what could be perceived as impossible. All is connected in her art process, the sculptural qualities and the painterly quality melt together as an entireness. Slightly concave surfaces and waves depict the upheavals of time and life. This exploration in the materiality allows her to merge artistic intentions into stories about existence.
Immersed in her own singular universe, Ann Beate Tempelhaug dedicates this exhibition Nord to the great Nordic landscapes and the energy flow they provide her. The abstraction of her porcelain glazed works captures the attention and fascinates the eye. Since she was a child, her desire has been to create “these large formats that are bigger” than herself, no doubt as a way of reaching a threshold of spirituality that belongs to her only, and which she wants to share with us. And for connecting herself stronger to life and to art. “As a child, I remember this huge mountain (Øyfjellet) outside our kitchen window. I had to see the entire mountain, and to be able to, I had to move very close to the window, which I did every day.”
Tempelhaug paints without knowing the final result of her glazes before firing. Working for days on end in her studio at the porcelain factory (NTP) in Norway, she releases her emotions against a backdrop of inner landscapes whose intensity follows the infinite line of jazz (Nils Petter Moldvær, Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang, among others), classic or Piazzolla’s liberated tango, a music she is particularly fond of when she sets to work and which transports to another places, as if in a creative trance. She plunges into her deepest feelings, treating them with successive brushstrokes of varying thickness. Her expressionist paintings are impregnated with colours that reveal themselves after the long five days of firing at 1300oC. They are surging waves of “chiaroscuro”, of dazzling light, sometimes polar and wintry, sometimes solar and summery, that invade the porcelain-enamelled stoneware mural. Fragile, often weakened by the heat of the kiln. Not all of her large sculptures reach us – that’s the mystery and risk of the ceramic firing process. Her husband and her lover, Eirik Gjedrem, also a ceramist, accompanies her on this artistic and existential adventure like a guardian angel. He is her main assistant during the heavy and complexed creation processes of her works.
Nord will feature a selection of new large-scale works created during the first part of 2023 including: Beyond (Bortenfor), Milonga, Mirage (Luftspeiling), Mostly North (Det meste er Nord), Into Love (Inn i kjærlighet), Oblivion (Glemsel), Prelude (Forspill), Polar Light (Nordlys), Twilight (Skumring), Umbra… – along with smaller, more intimate works with rounded, organic contours like In-Out, which transport us into another space-time, both lyrical and metaphysical. The impression is of emerging from nothingness and feeling at one with a lake, a forest, a sky drowning in deep water, in an immensity as far as the eye can see. Each of these extraordinarily powerful paintings expresses, in its own way, the artist’s strong and profound emotions, reflecting her life’s journeys and her quest for transcendence. “I am moved by nature, but I don’t feel directly linked to a movement of painters who work with nature as a subject or a medium”. In a free, abstract expressionism, Tempelhaug uses her pictorial art as catharsis.
Lise Coirier, August 2023.
