Mari Slaattelid

Mari Slaattelid (b. 1960) is one of Norway’s foremost contemporary artists. She gives visual presence to emotions and sense-related expressions, but in a manner akin to conceptual art. In constructing her works she often combines traditional media with photographs and sculptural objects. This method instigates a dialogue between the intention and the artistic expression, the latter of which exists somewhere on a scale between abstract art and concrete art. In this way Slaattelid dialogues with two of Modernism’s most dominant trends.

In The Voice/Woman Pretending to Be a Painting (1999), we see the upper back of a woman against a background of foliage. The picture is based on a black-and-white projection of a photograph. The woman’s upper torso seems illuminated, yet her hair, arms and the foreground are submerged in shadow. The title and landscape recall Edvard Munch’s picture Stemmen (The Voice). Slaattelid seeks here to re-actualize what she believes is extraordinary about Munch’s painting, namely the relation between the motif and the title. The absence of an immediate connection between them liberates the viewer’s gaze and senses and invites wonderment. How did the motif get such a title? To whom does the voice belong?

Protective (2000) is a series of four photographs in which Slaattelid fuses trivial everyday rituals with abstract questions about how we choose to represent ourselves. The artist’s daughter, Åsne, is photographed in a classic frontal position against a white ground. The girl wears a white shirt and her face is partly smeared with a white substance. In her gaze we may find elements of stubbornness and pride, but also melancholy and vulnerability. The girl is exposed, only partly protected by the white 'mask', which also partly disfigures her face.

This pictorial series can be read as commenting on a woman’s world – a world in which the construction of surfaces follows its own logic. Young girls try to hide the child in themselves and instead appear as young women. Later in life, women use makeup to try to look younger. With these photographs, Slaattelid shows how the trivial application of makeup can intersect with many of the problems internal to painting. The artist explores the materiality of painting by allowing the flat surface to remain itself while also partially covering the motif of the girl’s face. In doing so, the motif thematically addresses the limits of painting, and Slaattelid shows how it is possible to think via painting, yet without locking the medium into a specific tradition. The white colour and small variations in the girl’s facial expression can also be seen as aesthetic variations over a painterly theme. White-on-white poses a challenge to painters. It is a theme first expressed in Malevich’s white square on white ground (1918), a work often considered the harbinger of colourfield painting.

Gerhard Richter is one of Slaattelid’s greatest influences, especially with respect to surface treatments in her earliest works. In 2000 she won the prestigious 'Carnegie Art Award, Nordic Painting 2000', for her works Protective and Reading Woman.

BL/ed. HBU

Mari Slaattelid
The voice/Woman pretending to be a
painting, 1999