A major, retrospective exhibition of Bleken's charcoal drawings. Works by Håkon Bleken were last shown at the Henie Onstad Art Centre 34 years ago in 1974, an exhibition that also featured his charcoal drawings. This time, works from the early 1960s up until 2009 are on display, and Bleken has created a series of new drawings especially for the occasion.
Few artists in Norway have developed the medium of charcoal drawing further than Håkon Bleken. Throughout his long career, he has not only perfected the method, but also continually renewed the content of his drawings. This retrospective exhibition presents a wide selection of drawings, ranging from the very beginning of Bleken's career to an extensive series of drawings created especially for this exhibition.
Bleken's drawings can be divided into more or less distinctive phases. During the 1970s, he developed three separate series of works, of which the first, Fragments of a Dictatorship, was shown at venues such as The Artists' House in Oslo in 1970. The next series, Fragments of Love, was first shown to the public at The National Gallery, Oslo, in February 1972 and contained a narrower selection of strongly emotional themes. Fragments of Truth was the title of Bleken's exhibition at The Henie Onstad Art Centre in 1974, when his use of photographs gave rise to a heated debate; has an artist the right to use the creative work of others as a basis for his own art?
After this, Bleken adopted a more objective approach to his work and concentrated to a greater extent on painting. Nevertheless, there was one exception: in order to refine his technique and develop the thematic scope of his work, Bleken developed over a period of years a series of drawings based on photographs taken at the slaughter house. Traces of the technical skills and dramatic motifs that he refined in this series reappear in his later works. For this current exhibition, Bleken has produced a new drawing in this series, Large Slaughter House (2008).
Charcoal drawing is an extremely specific form of drawing. Motifs are drawn on paper or canvas by means of charcoal in the form of crayons, powder or blocks. As a material, charcoal has the propensity to produce heavy-handed works that can remind us just as much of a sculptor's modelling of some heavy material as of a drawer's delicate hand on paper. Bleken uses templates to highlight contrasts between black and white; he applies charcoal and then washes it off again, using fixative to "freeze" the motif. In The Storm (1973), for instance, there are probably at least 50 layers of charcoal. This experimentation with charcoal, paper and fixative has also led to the virtual disintegration of some of Bleken's drawings today – one example being In Flames from 1973. For this reason, the latter drawing has been laid flat in a showcase for the purpose of this exhibition.
Bleken's most recent drawings are being exhibited for the first time in the "Lille Prisma" hall at The Henie Onstad Art Centre. The drawing Il Duce (2008) from his latest series is a further development of Bleken's approach to existential questions. Traces of the same templates and motifs can be seen in Awakening – Crucifixion (2008) and in a work with the lucid title Remnants (2008).
Throughout his entire career as an artist, Bleken has been an active writer and contributor to public debates - and has himself been the subject of debate. We have therefore decided to publish a selection of his essays and contributions to debates dating from the 1960s to the present day. This publication represents the first opportunity for the public to see the connection between Bleken the artist and Bleken the writer.
The Henie Onstad Art Centre has curated and developed the exhibition, which will also be shown in Haugesund later in the year.
Curator: Tone Hansen
JANUARY 8 - APRIL 19, 2009
THE PRISMA GALLERIES
