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Vanessa BairdCRABBED
Vanessa Baird is a key figure in Nordic contemporary art. She has also won international acclaim for her singular, picture book-inspired imagery and bold narrative style. The personal is always political in her works. Baird alternates deftly between monumental and intimate, between traditional and avant-garde. Her detailed, bright works on paper are underpinned by a surrealism that employs exaggeration and shock effects.
For many years, Vanessa Baird has excelled in a kind of kitchen-sink realism, with de-romanticised renderings of everyday life from a feminist perspective. Her drastic scenes are often literally and symbolically set in claustrophobically diminutive spaces, where the unglamorous sides of motherhood and ageing are portrayed with dark humour and frenzy.
The exhibition CRABBED confronts us with both the unadorned quotidian life and with an alarming interpretation of the unimaginable atrocities of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The harrowing pictures show severed limbs, dead people, bombed places, and refugees fighting for their lives. This is a furious testament of engagement with and despair over the suffering that is going on right now before our very eyes.
The many retakes of the same themes and motifs in the overwhelming multitude (more than 300 works) of this exhibition reflects the repetitive nature of life. Art, here, is a powerful reminder that we must not turn a blind eye to the existential tragedies currently taking place in the world.
participating artists
ABOUT
Vanessa Baird
Vanessa Baird, born 1963, is one of Norway's foremost contemporary artists. She is celebrated for her unique, uncompromising works on paper. Based in Oslo, she studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo and the Royal College of Art in London. Baird's art is regularly exhibited internationally. In autumn 2024, she was featured in a major retrospective at the new Munch Museum in Oslo. Vanessa Baird is represented in the Nordic Watercolour Museum collection.
