6.2 - 3.4 2005

Michael Kvium (born 1955) is best known for his oil paintings where he has succeeded in creating a very personal figurative iconography and style. Less well known are his fantastic watercolours and drawings, which have always formed an important part of his artistic production. He uses them to explore ideas and thoughts, and they possess a spontaneity and creative joy which oil painting can never exhibit. We feel how close we approach him as artist. We enter a baroque-style world where all is misshapen and verges on the grotesque. Michael Kvium poses difficult questions in his art. He is very critical towards our contemporary culture and lifestyle in which glamorous ideals and glossy superficiality have become the norm while anything which is 'other' is seen as a threat. But he treats this world with warm irony and humour and in doing so raises the paintings to another human level. Michael Kvium is one of Denmark's most interesting painters of his generation and his very personal art moves us strongly.

Bernd Koberling

10.4 - 22.5 2005

Bernd Koberling (born 1938) is a Berliner, and he has been an integral part of the German art scene since the 1960s with his powerful and personal paintings. Koberling has visited Iceland every summer for the past twenty years and it is there that he
paints his watercolours. The exhibition consists of 92 large works. They were all painted during the past summer and are his biggest watercolours so far. It is not the vast openness or the dynamic landscape of Iceland that grasps Bernd Koberling’s
attention but the endless details and variations in the arctic vegetation and climate. He paints the weather, the water and the atmosphere as well as the harsh survival of the microcosmic world as symbolised by leaves, roots, berries, weather-beaten
plants and mushrooms. He paints the beauty of detail, of the essence and purity of life.

Ivar Arosenius

5.6 - 25.9 2005

Gravity and levity are twin companions in the pictorial world of Ivar Arosenius. In summer 2005 the Nordic Watercolour Museum will be presenting a rich selection from his extensive production of watercolours and gouaches. Arosenius started early using watercolour to relate, amuse and alarm. A cutting irony directed against dishonest authorities is often a hallmark of his paintings, but accompanied by a sense of romantic longing. The exhibition provides instances of his social criticism and of the
ranging between investigative realism and creative imagination which Arosenius developed using the form of the fairytale as his means.

The works exhibited are loaned from Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Malmö Konstmuseum, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, Västerås Konstmuseum and from private collections.

Marlene Dumas, Holland

16.10 - 30.11 2005

Marlene Dumas has had a unique position since the early 1980´s within the world of figurative painting focusing on how the human body is translated into an image. Dumas does not use models, but instead takes her images are from her own photo archive, mass media and popular culture sources. Dumas´work are psychologically disturbing but within their provocative energy lurk provocative questions about gender, identity, oppression, sexual and ethnic violence, and the situation of women and minorities; Dumas is always seeking to initiate new thought processes and critical strategies.

Marlene Dumas blurs the boundries between painting and drawing. Bold lines and shapes mix seamlessly with ephemeral washes and thick gestural brushwork. By simplifying and distorting her subjects, Dumas creates intimacy through alienation.

The exhibition is originated in collaboration with the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden and the Helsinki Festival and Kunsthalle Helsinki. Selected as the core of the exhibition is an extraordinary serie of 211 watercolours, Female, from 1992-93 that belongs to the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Sammlung Garnatz.