Heli Sammalisto, Finland

Somewhere in a Distant Land
2.2 - 17.3, 2002

Heli Sammalisto builds up her works with colours, shapes and fragments. In this exhibition she presents watercolour collages from the past two years. She has developed an individual style in which scraps of paper, paint and torn pieces of old wallpaper all blend to form large pictorial creations reminiscent of island archipelagos and of past times. Memories and a longing - both gentle and harsh - for islands, sea and community are what give this exhibition its special flavour, a flavour reinforced by the title chosen by the artist: 'Somewhere in a distant land'. (This title contains a reference to Finland's best known tango, Aavan meren tuolla puolen, a dance form of which the Finns are especially fond).

Water / Colour

A selection from the museum's collections
2.2 - 28.4, 2002

What do today's watercolour artists achieve with just the basic ingredients of water and pigment? The exhibition Water/Colour seeked to provide an answer by displaying the work of ten different Nordic artists. There were paintings in which colour asserted its physical presence in the form of pure pigment and others were it appeared no more tangible than in some digital projection.

K G Nilson, Sweden

23.3 - 28.4, 2002

For a long while colour and politics have been a source of interest to the Swedish artist K G Nilson. Since the sixties he has been soberly yet playfully studying the effects of colour, of social interplay and the relative balance of power. In this exhibition he presents gouache paintings, a technique about which he writes: 'Gouache is, alongside pure watercolour, the most common of watercolour techniques. The opaqueness of the paint focuses attention upon the effect of the colour itself, and in this way it can resemble oil painting and screen printing. The technique also provides a link to the world of books, to medieval incunabula and contemporary illustration. I've chosen to use gouache as a flexible and direct medium for testing new ideas, and the works exhibited here reflect my view of the world from the sixties to the present'.

Contemporary Nordic Watercolour

5.5 - 1.9, 2002

The gathering of paintings is an ongoing and important part of the work of the Nordic Watercolour Museum. The governing principle is the acquisition of contemporary watercolours by practising artists from all the Nordic countries. In summer 2002 the museum's lecture hall was temporarily transformed into an exhibition gallery. Pictures of faces exert a fascination for most of us; eyes and facial features speak to us directly and powerfully. But there are even other ways in which to depict a personality.

Olav Christopher Jenssen, Norway

Moderation - section from The Empty Drawing Room
5.5 - 1.9, 2002

Brand new paintings by the Norwegian artist Olav Christopher Jenssen filled the galleries of the Nordic Watercolour Museum throughout the summer of 2002.115 new works, sensuous studies of colour and form, splendidly painted with a soft hair pencil. The artist finished the paintings with a thin layer of wax creating a surface both diffuse and transparent.

Exhibition catalogue available.

Vanessa Baird, Norway

You can't keep a good rabbit down
8.9 - 13.10, 2002

With biting black humour the Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird describes many varied situations in human existence. She makes frequent use of an elegantly romantic fairy-tale style against which the subject rebels in sharp contrast, shattering the accepted traditions of the genre. Her narrative style has its roots - both in technique and pictorial range - in the strong English illustrative tradition here converted to our contemporary condition.
This exhibition, a co-production with Galleri Wang in Oslo, presents mainly watercolours from recent years.

Exhibition catalogue available.

Wet Dreams

Sol LeWitt, USA

10.11, 2002 - 2.2, 2003

Sol LeWitt, born at Hartford, Connecticut in 1928, is one of the most significant of contemporary artists. In November 2002 he took over the Nordic Watercolour Museum. Using as his starting point the architecture and design of the museum's galleries he is producing a totally unique work. Wall drawings will be created, designed to suit specific sites and based on sketches made especially for the museum, to be then complemented with works on paper from recent years. This was the first one-man exhibition of Sol LeWitt's site-specific wall drawings to be presented in the Nordic countries.

Exhibition catalogue available.