Image Support

Image Support presents the work of four international artists across the four main galleries of Bergen Kunsthall. Taking as their starting point ideas around the image and its construction, all of the artists explore the complex relations between technology, representation, production and reproduction (both industrial and craft-based).

In the work of Eileen Quinlan and Lucas Blalock, photography is used not only to document a reality beyond the camera lens, but also as a technical process through which the image is created or situated by means of it’s chemical or digital apparatus. In Quinlan’s work she manipulates negatives by scratching or subjecting them to corrosive chemicals or processes. In another series she employs a flatbed scanner, producing a kind of "anti-abstraction" using mirrors and other objects and materials that she places or moves across the scanners surface. Blalock’s work often begins with a staged, studio set up—a kind of "still life—that he photographs using a medium format camera and then manipulates, using Photoshop and digital post-production techniques, to create provocative and complex analogue / digital hybrids.

Marieta Chirulescu and Ann Cathrin November Høibo’s works are located in painting, sculpture and textile, but they too engage in similar processes of manipulation, production and reproduction. Chirulescu also employs scanners, copiers and post-production tools in order to produce her canvases, which involve a complex layering of real and virtual materials and spaces, whilst continuing to allude to a tradition of painting. Høibo’s work is perhaps the most sculptural, exploring the inherent materiality of various found and altered textiles, fabrics, and objects. In her hand-woven tapestries, one can see an improvised, personal, but almost mechanical production, again referring directly to the technology of the loom, but through this more explicitly craft-based technique.

Through their very different studio-based practices, the four artists all work in the borderland between creating images and locating images. The final work arises by way of a self-reflexive investigation of the material itself, a process that lays the basis for improvisation and exploration, and which often permits chance and “errors” in production to become crucial to the image-making process. In this way they reveal that the material of an artwork is not just a physical foundation or support for an image; in many cases it constitutes both the image itself and the content of the work.

Curated by Martin Clark and Steinar Sekkingstad.

Lucas Blalock (b. 1978), lives and works in New York.
Marieta Chirulescu (b. 1974), lives and works in Berlin and Rome. 
Ann Cathrin November Høibo (b. 1979), lives and works in Kristiansand. 
Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972), lives and works in New York.

A new publication is available to accompany the exhibition with texts by Martin Clark, Steinar Sekkingstad and Monica Westin.

Also opening in our NO. 5 space:

Xanti Schawinsky
Head Drawings and Faces of War
January 8–February 28, 2016

Alexander ‘Xanti’ Schawinsky was a first generation Bauhaus artist who studied in Weimar under Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius during the late 1920s. This exhibition—curated by Brett Littman and originally presented at The Drawing Center, New York in 2014—focuses on two bodies of work that Schawinsky made in the US between 1941 and 1946: "Faces of War" and "Head Drawings." 

In NO.5 Bergen Kunsthall revisits selected artworks and exhibitions, previously presented elsewhere in the world. It provides an opportunity to slow down, focus on, and look again at particular works, exhibitions or fragments of exhibitions. Bergen Kunsthall has produced a new publication to accompany the show, available to download on our website, with a new text by Milena Høgsberg.

Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War is made possible by the support of The Kind World Foundation, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Daniel Schawinsky and the Xanti Schawinsky Estate, and Fiona and Eric Rudin. Special thanks to Anke Kempkes and BROADWAY 1602.