FRANS WIDERBERG

Paintings and Prints
11 SEPTEMBER – 23 OCTOBER 2009

Picture: Frans Widerberg and Mike Pedersen,
Founder of the Norwegian Collaboration Centre
promoting the Norwegain Pavilion at the Art Fair.

In the past, the Norwegian painter Frans Widerberg has been described as a seer, a healer, a shaman, a storyteller and a cosmologist. There is some truth in each of those descriptions but for his English audience a better comparison might be with Shakespeare’s Prospero, a magician presiding over an enchanted world. There are differences though. Whereas Prospero’s island was largely benign, Widerberg locates his dramatis personae in an existential wilderness illuminated by a light that sometimes recalls the Aurora Borealis and at others a post-nuclear incandescence.

Echoing Prospero’s trope that “we are such creatures as dreams are made on”, Widerberg maintains that his “pictures are based on experiences, wishes and dreams. They are reality, just as wishes and dreams are. I provide myself with a pictorial universe where anything is possible.” That reality includes both timelessness and weightlessness: figures hover, levitate or swoop and dive. The horse and rider is a recurrent motif, instantly summoning Goethe’s ‘Erl King’ to us, while reminding us that Widerberg is the inheritor of Norse legends, as well as the heightened emotionalism of Edvard Munch. 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 fallability.

For more info please visit:

www.norway.org.uk

www.northumbria.ac.uk