TRACES AND SPACES

This exhibition focuses on Groth as an artist, his contemporaries and his sources of inspiration; an exhibition that highlights the tendencies of the period spanning Groth's career and kindred spirits across boundaries of time and place.

Traces and Spaces is the result of a collaboration between Rogaland Art Museum in Stavanger and the Henie Onstad Art Centre at Høvikodden. Jan Groth reached the age of 70 in 2008, the same year as the city where he was born, Stavanger. There are historical reasons for the Henie Onstad Art Centre's role as collaborative partner for this exhibition: Jan Groth's first solo exhibition in Norway was held at the Art Centre in 1974 – a large-scale presentation of his work that had a significant effect on the Norwegian art arena and on Jan Groth's own career. Further exhibitions were organised here later on and it was at Høvikodden that Groth and his colleagues embroidered the stage curtain for the New Norwegian Theatre in 1984-85. It is therefore natural to say "welcome home" to Jan Groth, both to Stavanger and to Høvikodden!

ARTISTIC LINKS
Though permanently resident in the USA and constantly on the move due to exhibitions in different parts of the world, Jan Groth's oeuvre is rooted in the art traditions of Europe. In addition to influences stemming from his two native countries, Norway and Denmark, many associations and parallels to other European artists and countries are apparent in his works.

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911-84) was one of the Danish artists with whom Groth felt the greatest affinity. She belonged to an earlier generation, but he recognised parallels in their artistic intentions. They worked with different materials and idioms, but Sonja Ferlov Mancoba's sculptures extended into the surrounding room, only to be recaptured by their own hollows and openings; some were slim and supple, others had sharp bones and rounded joints – archetypical shapes characteristic of much of the art of the 20th century, including Jan Groth's. The artistic dialogue with Mancoba has been a counterbalance and an unceasing source of inspiration for Jan Groth ever since.

The works by Henri Michaux (1899-1948) have always enthralled Jan Groth, who acquired one of his drawings at an early stage. If Michaux's drawings are compared with Groth's, there are striking resemblances, but the two artists had different aims: whereas Michaux chose words as the point of departure for his rapid, impulsive and usually figurative drawings, Groth's simple strokes reveal the opposite – a lengthy and concentrated process of creation. Michaux's dynamism and simple drawing technique captivated him, but it was above all Michaux's honesty, strong will and manic activity that Groth was most interested in.

The artist most often referred to in connection with Jan Groth's sculptures is Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966). Groth's earliest, most "figure-like" sculptures in particular, bear a striking resemblance to Giacometti's works, both as regards the treatment of the material and the figures' relationship to their surroundings. Both artists create slender, elongated forms – almost transparent constructions with an intense presence that generates strong vibrations in the space around them. Giacometti's impact on his contemporaries and on subsequent generations cannot be overestimated and it is impossible to exclude Giacometti's oeuvre when appraising Groth's sculptures. Nevertheless, it is important to note that there are clear differences between the two artists, both as regards content and working method. Giacometti creates spatial fullness by paring away at his works, while Groth constantly adds to his. Giacometti always creates figures, people, who are literally eaten up and devoured by the surroundings, so that hardly anything is left but their soul. In his drawings, Groth's strokes can also be perceived as nerve strands, but his sculptures are abstract in form. But the affinity between the two artists - what Jan Groth calls the "art of the state of being" - will always exist.

Eva Hesse (1936-70) used fragile materials such as fibreglass and latex to make forms that were often organic, powerful and yet frail all at the same time. Through her, Groth discovered a way of creating organic forms that actually was quite old, but which Eva Hesse's works managed to renew. At once fragile and compelling, her works possessed some of the disquiet that Groth himself was trying to communicate. Hesse's works often conceal their core, but as Groth puts it: if you had undressed the objects, they would have closely resembled his own sculptures.

One of the artists that Groth met in America and who greatly influenced him, was Ruth Vollmer (1903-82). In spite of the great difference in their ages, Hesse and Vollmer became close friends and both belonged to the circle of minimalist artists around Sol LeWitt. They had both originally come from Germany and had the same aesthetic background. They also shared feelings for biology, which so few of the other minimalists were willing to acknowledge, but which Groth as a European immediately felt at home with. Ruth Vollmer acted as a bridge between the minimalists, the Bauhaus movement and European constructivists such as Gabo and Pevsner. Her own art was comprised of mathematical forms that she considered purer than language and that she believed were free, like music, from most associations. Even though her technique and idiom was firmly rooted in conventional modernism, she looked upon her sculptures almost as "found objects" and as simple exponents of natural laws, rather than as creative, constructed forms.

Jan Groth has always been interested in the East and in Etruscan and Cycladic art, as he strives to give archetypical pictures a visual language that transcends historical times, national boundaries and individual experiences. With this in mind, Groth found his encounter with Isamu Noguchi's (1904-88) art and the rich variety of both geometrical and organic forms that the latter used as symbols of nature's life-giving power, extremely stimulating. Groth's form of expression developed in a different and more abstract direction, but Noguchi's use of negative space and the meditative qualities of his works have always been a source of inspiration for Groth.

The exhibition comprises 112 works of art, of which 33 by Jan Groth himself, and covers various different mediums: paintings, sculptures, textile art, drawings, watercolours and videos.

MAY 7 - SEPTEMBER 13, 2009
THE PRISMA GALLERIES