Olle Bærtling. A Modern Classic

Olle Bærtling was one of the Nordic countries' leading and most internationally orientated artists of the postwar era. While he was perceived in his own time as a controversial and much talked about modernist, he has emerged today as a canonized modern classic, and his paintings have become modernist icons with great visual power of conviction.

Bærtling belonged to a generation of artists who over the course of the 1950's and '60's took up the legacy of abstract painting's pioneers. In Paris he was one of the circle around the "Salon des Realités Nouvelles" and Galerie Denise René, and like many of the artists there he developed a keen interest in "clear form". In contrast to the time's expressive and subjectivistic painting, these artists were more concerned with how form, line and color create negations, after-images and optical phenomena. Over the years, however, Bærtling developed a more complex language where the expression seemed to exceed the pictures' pure geometric and formalistic basis. By the mid-1960's he had also begun to exhibit in New York and other places in the USA, and he gradually came to be associated with trends current in art at the time such as Hard Edge, Op-Art and minimalism.

Expressing the Modern Condition
Although Bærtling abandoned representative painting in favor of a consistent geometric-abstract expression, it is in many ways the modern condition which comes to be expressed in his works. Large monochrome color fields are divided by a set of powerful, diagonal lines which create open, unending forms. The pictures' aggressive play of lines, pure color and hard contrasting planes echo what we find in modern society's different forms and surfaces. The energy in the works has much in common with the dynamic, disquieting and hectic pulse of modern life. This is reinforced by the pictures' pseudo-mechanical workmanship and the colors' synthetic quality which bears no semblance to nature or natural phenomena. Even the titles seem culturally coded, although they do not have any obvious significance.

Open, unlimited structure
Bærtling is particularly well known as "the father of the open form". In his works from the 1950' and '60's, the formal elements become increasingly accentuated as endless, unlimited and open. The contours' intersections are set beyond the picture area such that one's focus is shifted out over the picture itself and off into its surroundings, toward the wall and the surrounding space. With this open structure, Bærtling broke with the tradition from which he arose, one which emphasized the picture as a closed compositional form built on a set of internal relations. Bærtling was concerned that the works should reflect the times in which they were made, and he himself placed this open, unlimited structure within the context of the step into the space age's universe.

This exhibition is curated by The National Museum's Senior Curator, Øystein Ustvedt, and by John Peter Nilsson, of Moderna Museet.

Venues
16.06-16.09.2007 The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
06.10.2007-12.01.2008 Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Olle Baertling. A Modern Classic
Kuratoren: Oystein Ustvedt, John Peter Nilsson
The National Gallery

Stationen:
16.06.07 - 16.09.07 National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo

06.10.07 - 12.01.08 Moderna Museet, Stockholm