Maiken Stene:
Via Norwegian Mountains, part 1

Landscape painting has had a strong position throughout the last three centuries of art history. The exhibition «Via Norwegian mountains, part 1» is an ongoing project where Maiken Stene investigates how romantic landscape paintings has influenced her own and our society’s image of the Norwegian nature.

The exhibition presents an installation of studies, videos and large expressive (yet still governed by rules) paintings based on the experience of well known lookout points in the western part of the country. Stene explores the experience of nature through portraying sublime landscapes and she researches how it is possible to recreate our experience on a canvas, and furthermore on how we relate to nature as a construction. Most of her paintings has taken several months to complete, yet a couple of them has been spontaneously done in twenty minutes, where every gesture is rooted in the experience of nature itself. She also presents a stop-motion video where we see photographs of landscapes from the western part of Norway, made into a collage where all the lookout points are cut out. These cut outs have in turn become painted signs that leads the way inside the gallery to our own experience.

Maiken Stene (b. 1983) is a visual artist from Soknedal in Rogaland. She has studied at Konsthögskolan in Malmö and Cooper Union in NYC. She works with installation, painting, video and text, where she is exploring the visual and sensory experience of nature.