KjARTan Slettemark: First comprehensive retrospective exhibition

The National Museum of Art, Architecture & Design is pleased to invite the press to a preview of the exhibition “KjARTan Slettemark. The art of being art” on Thursday, 12 September at 11.00 a.m. in the Museum of Contemporary Art. The official opening takes place on Friday, 13 September at 6.00 p.m. and will be hosted by Jan Erik Vold. Karin and Marie Grönlund, Kjartan Slettemark’s partners and art administrators, will be present at the opening. The exhibition will run until 23 February 2014. A very warm welcome! Press contact: Eva Engeset, eva.engeset@nasjonalmuseet.no, tel. +47 46 95 01 02.

“KjARTan Slettemark. The art of being art” is the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition since Kjartan Slettemark’s death in 2008. It is also the first major exhibition of Slettemark’s work to be shown in Oslo since his official breakthrough at The Artists’ House in 1982.

Kjartan Slettemark (1932–2008) is one of Norway’s best known, beloved and berated artists. A pioneer in many areas, he was one of the first Nordic artists to work with performance and activist art. He has been, and is, a major role model for political street art and performance art – while he effectively drove a cleft through the arts scene in Norway and the art press.

His Vietnam painting has attracted more coverage in the media than any other Norwegian work of art. For 18 years Slettemark sought to give the work to the National Gallery, which firmly declined. Finally the people of Norway collected enough money to buy the work and donate it to the museum. Thus it came to be part of the museum’s collection. Today it is considered to be one of Norway’s most important works of art – in 2003, Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet named it Norway’s most important work of art.

Two of his most iconic works are the Poodle and the Nixon Passport, both on show in the exhibition. According to Slettemark, the Poodle was the henpecked husband of the art world and a depiction of the power chasm between artist and art institution in particular. The Nixon Passport is a photo montage of Slettemark himself and Nixon, the sitting US president. He glued the photo montage in a passport and travelled around the world with it – including to the USA.

For more than 50 years he was an active, driving force in the Nordic arts scene. In Slettemark’s world, there was no dividing line between art and life. The idiosyncratic capitalisation of his first name suggests that art had been an integral element in his life ever since his baptism as a child.

Given that the artist’s own life plays such a central role in the artistic content, the exhibition follows his artistic progression more or less chronologically, from the first drawings made in Naustdal in Sunnfjord to the final works he produced in Stockholm.

Stina Högkvist is curator of the exhibition, which is the result of collaboration with Karin and Marie Grönlund, who lived and worked with Slettemark for the last 26 years of his life and today administer the body of work that Slettemark left to us.

The exhibition will go on display at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in summer 2014.