Vanessa Baird - You Are Something Else

Vanessa Baird has distinguished herself as one of the strongest and most uncompromising voices in contemporary Norwegian art. The exhibition You Are Something Else at KODE presents her critically acclaimed work with the same title. The work attracted considerable attention when it was launched at Kunstnernes Hus in 2017. You Are Something Else is a continuous visual narrative covering tenfolds of five-metre-high paper panels drawn in pastels. Through her distinctive fabulating idiom, Baird weaves together escapes across the sea, visual popular culture and everyday life, engulfing the public in a dramatic, grotesque and poetic tale of our times.

Parallel to the exhibition You Are Something Else, KODE is launching an exhibition of works on paper by Baird and her fellow artist Mette K. Hellenes (b. 1964). Hellenes and Baird have been working together for many years. In this exhibition they present a broad selection of self-portraits, watercolours and satirical drawings. The two exhibitions will be shown in the Stenersen Room at KODE.

About the artists
This year Vanessa Baird was commissioned to illustrate the Nobel diploma, has won the prestigious Telenor Culture Prize, and attracted both attention and rave reviews for her presentation at The Armory Show in New York. In 2013 a work commissioned from Baird for the bombed Oslo government district was rejected by the Norwegian authorities on the grounds that it might rekindle feelings of anxiety and grief in government employees. This triggered a heated debate in the media and the work quickly became Norway’s most discussed work of art in recent times. In 2015 she was awarded Norway’s most prestigious art prize, Lorck Schives kunstpris. Baird has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at Kunstnernes Hus (2017) and at the Göteborg Museum of Art (2014).