Irma Salo Jæger

This is the first retrospective exhibition with Salo Jæger, and showcases the significant body of work this vigorous artist has produced throughout her life. It examines her breakthrough at the end of the 1950s and early ‘60s, and her development over the subsequent decades, as well as completely new works.

For over sixty years, Irma Salo Jæger has been exploring the most fundamental components of painting. Over the course of her long career she has gained an extensive theoretical knowledge of geometry and colour theory, and formed a close relationship with the tools of her artist’s trade.

For Salo Jæger, painting is not a thing to be taken lightly. She gets to the very heart of the medium, having worked consistently with oil paints and tempera, the latter being an old binding medium comprising coloured pigments suspended in a mixture of egg, boiled linseed oil, and water. Salo Jæger is intimately familiar with the refractive properties of these ancient binding agents, and knows from experience how shifts in light – the seasons – affect the coloured surfaces of a painting. At the same time, the working process never has predictable results.