Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- Contemporary Norwegian sculptors, whether working at home or abroad, demonstrate a shared background of inspiration, materials and careful craftsmanship that is readily apparent in the work of six artists on display at Scandinavia House. The traveling show, titled "Between Space and Time: Norwegian Sculpture and Installation," is the first chance American art lovers have had to assess powerful and innovative work by living Norwegian artists without traveling to their homeland. It will run through Nov. 11 at the new center for Nordic art in the shadow of Grand Central Terminal. Advertisement The artists represented are Per Barclay, Per Inge Bjorlo, Bard Breivik, Bente Stokke, Gunnar Torvund, and Kristin Ytreberg, all of them in mid-career. Most work in Norway with the exception of Barclay, who works in Paris, and Stokke, who lives in Berlin. Breivik has studios in New York as well as Oslo. Advertisement The exhibition was organized by the Association of Norwegian Sculptors in Oslo as a dialogue among artists with common experiences but individual concerns, and it has been touring the United States, coming to Scandinavia House as its final venue from Seattle. It represents the art of one of the most homogenous countries in the world, with a non-Norwegian population of only three percent. There are 20 works in the show, including traditional sculptures, non-traditional sculptural forms such as installations, and photography that draw on Norwegian folklore and the aboriginal Lapp culture and use such traditional materials as wood, stone, metals and ivory along with modern materials of plexiglass and fiberglass. The show leaves viewers with several distinct impressions. One is the pervasive influence of the sea that has made Norwegians seafarers, shipbuilders, and explorers from the time of the Vikings to the current era of shipping line and offshore oil entrepreneurs. Other impressions are a sense of introspection that may be a result of centuries of cultural isolation and tensions that have grown out of psychological concerns relating to isolation, which can be expected to lessen as Norway and its artists become more cosmopolitan. Gunnar Torvund's eccentric sculptures are the most disturbing and personal in the show. He uses the human figure or parts of the human body for inspiration and harks back to Christian iconography, especially in a baby-size lead effigy, mummy-wrapped from the waist down, titled "Torture." Advertisement Torvund is also represented by a wooden helmet with a weird collection of ax heads, severed hands and legs, metal sleigh bells, a bird wing and a horn suspended inside it titled "Thought House (Helmet)," a human head in lead face-up on a doll-size sleigh, and a recumbent figure shaped like a thermometer paved with green glass tiles. In contrast, Ytreberg -- an architect turned artist -- creates precisely installed rooms that are airy and poetic. Her lightly woven steel screen embroidered with loopy patterns of twisted wire seems weightless in an installation that includes a squat metal chair and a rust-colored length of fabric folded over a ceiling rod. Stokke's video, titled "Crossing 2000," consists of water patterns you might see in the wake of a ship. She also is represented by three walls of photographs of her installations and performances in small square frames with such subjects as boat building, ships, map-like diagrams of constellations and seacoasts and navigational instruments. Breivik is also inspired by the sea, and his 20 hanging wall forms appear to be vertically hung fish traps made of wire, cast metal, wood, shell, terra cotta, rattan, and velvet in various attractive colors. One big daddy of a trap is formed of soldered brass wire floating horizontally on the wall like a slender fish. Advertisement Bjorlo goes in for what he calls "creatures," formed of steel sandblasted to a dull, soft, skin-like surface and posed matter-of-factly on the floor. One appears to have been inspired by a ball-and-chain, another looks like a pith helmet supported by tassels, and a third seems to be a three-headed organism from another planet. Barclay's full-size room installations at specific sites are represented by big, beautiful color photographs. They are of a Greek Orthodox church interior, a rococo room decorated in the Chinese style in an Italian palace, and the inside of an old Norwegian boathouse. What they have in common are floors covered with several inches of motor oil that reflects the surroundings. The three rooms represented in the show were a photographic commission from Artforum, an American magazine, in 1990. They have been described as inspiring a sense of ecological doom in viewers, ironic in the context of the Norwegian oil industry. Barclay has continued with these room installations using operating rooms and slaughterhouses with floors covered with blood.
