Art Critics - Kari Elisabeth Haug
Art Critique by Kjetil Røed, June 15, 2024
Solo Exhibition: "HOME – The Land of Silence"
Volodymyr Contemporary Art Laboratory, Berger
Welcome!
And thank you for giving me the opportunity to open Kari Elisabeth Haug's exhibition, The Land of Silence, here at the Volodymyr Contemporary Art Laboratory in Berger.
What do we see in art? And what can we say about what we see?
When we view art, it is always concrete and immediate, like the paintings of Kari Elisabeth Haug, which surround us today. They revolve around what we might call "the big questions": What is the meaning of human life? What are life and death, and how do we deal with these things? Big questions, indeed.
Or are they?
I wonder if we are doing ourselves a disservice by calling these questions "big," as it implies that the answers should be epic, grand, powerful, and substantial. In reality, the most fruitful answers often lie in the attempt, the draft, the sketch—much like what we see in Kari Elisabeth Haug's works.
Her expression is fragmented, vulnerable, and provisional—unlike the weighty, pompous, conclusive, and, yes, authoritarian. Kari Elisabeth Haug asks, "Could it be this way?" instead of asserting, "This is how it is!" This, in my opinion, is what elevates her works and gives them their human authenticity. It is what makes them vulnerable, as we humans are vulnerable beneath our armor and masks. It is what makes the expression stripped down, as we are naked beneath our clothes and beyond grandiose words. There is truth in nakedness—something that cannot be hidden once revealed. This truth is evident in these artworks, for the gravity—or perhaps the human dignity—of the so-called "big" questions can only be uncovered when we recognize how vulnerable, exploratory, and everyday their answers must be if we are to make any progress with them.
Kari Elisabeth Haug does not provide definitive answers but instead gives a distinct, ambiguous form to our attempts. Ambiguity here is not a negative trait but rather the necessary complexity we need to reflect deeply. Her paintings give us permission to dwell in multiplicity, much like the American artist Cy Twombly, whom some of her works may resemble. The French philosopher Roland Barthes once said of Twombly—and I believe it applies to Kari Elisabeth Haug as well—that "there is a clarity in Twombly’s hesitance, but this is not a vagueness that clouds or obscures; instead, it soothes us and teaches us to live with and through the complexity of meaning."
With this perspective, the painting Trinity does not become an iconic depiction of canonized holy figures from religious history—God, the Holy Spirit, the Messiah, or Buddha, for example—but rather outlines of energetic fields, small circles of life, resonating with one another. These could just as easily represent an ordinary family—a mother, a father, and a child—or a small circle of friends, as they could the Messiah, the Virgin Mary, or some revered prophet. These circles—or perhaps we should say encirclings—are the smallest common denominator of life's energy because they appear fragile yet simultaneously seek connection.
They vibrate in a shared rhythm.
Every rose comes into its own within a garden, just as each of us can only truly bloom within a community. This is evident in another of Kari Elisabeth Haug's works. This search for one's community—whether you are a rose or a human—is present throughout her art. It often takes shape as a line drawn between who we are as individuals and the necessity of being together. It is not always about humans seeking connection—nature's interplay and the harmonious ecosystems of friendship play a vital role in her paintings as well. Whether we take the path through a rose, a river, or the rich, red mineral earth (as seen in a painting of Mother Earth here), it is always to find others or to discover the greater life in nature—the bond between all living things. This is what keeps us alive and makes life worth living. Community.
The bonds, roots, love, and friendship—life's threads—are embedded in the traces we leave in one another. These traces are distilled to their simplest and most poignant form in another of Kari Elisabeth Haug's paintings, titled Imprint. Here, we see three lines, a small visual poem—a haiku, if you will—that perhaps represents what we leave behind in others. It also symbolizes the bond between the artwork as a life expression and the viewer standing before it. For it is not the case that we, standing here today, are isolated from the art around us, observing it from a distance. No, we are part of the processes of art, whether we like it or not. We are roses seeking to be part of the garden—friends seeking unity within the extended circle of friendship that art fosters.
Parks and squares are commons—shared spaces we can all access, enjoy, and wander through as we please. They are places for recreation and reflection, where no one can dictate whether you read a book, write a book, chat with a loved one, or simply enjoy a cup of coffee. Art, too, is such a shared space. It is within this "land between"—as one of Kari Elisabeth Haug’s works is titled—that we can gather and return to our community and the free spaces we need, just as other shared spaces allow us to flourish.
Her works are an invitation to collaborate on the "big questions," which, as suggested, might actually be small—but no less important. We are together in this, as viewers and as humans, just as we are gathered here today in front of—or perhaps even within—Kari Elisabeth Haug's works. Yes, the three small lines and all the other traces in the works around us are invitations to shared spaces where we can collectively grapple with what love is, what home is, what family is, how to face death, and what the meaning of it all might be. None of these questions have definitive answers, but all are addressed to everyone and accessible to all. Perhaps they will resonate with you in particular, allowing you to reflect further on what you have seen, thought, and felt throughout your life with others.
Let us step into that space together.
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Ancient perceptions and modern affections in the works of Elisabeth Haug (solo ex Galleria Collezionista, Rome)
A cura di Elena Gradini "The first meeting" - solo exhibition at Galleria Il Collezionista, Rome, 2018
A sudden and cutting gash seems to cleave the canvases of the artist Kari Elisabeth Haug with the same violent creative passion from which the gesture generates the visual substance, which is the plant itself. Suddenly, without soft transitions, the spectator perceives on himself a whole series of relationships with the other, necessarily identifying himself with the gesture fixed on the matter support. The artist is inspired to the double encounter with her homeland - the great North - and with the city of Rome, already investigated through the novels of the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset. Something strikes the hand and the mind of the artist, who reading and taking over the literary plot of the Undset, shows on the canvas the novelistic topic of the “Incontro”. The first meeting is in fact the dense report of the many different feelings of who i for the first time is find to cross the Eternal City, with all its incomparable beauties. A homage to Rome therefore, but also a homage to the meeting like event. The alogical meeting, the expected, the canceled or the feared. The complex of physical and emotional relationships that to it are tied in an indispensable way; the consequences that can be alleged. These are all thematics that emerge strongly in the works of the artist Haug that thanks to the clear and decisive gesture manages to express with the color an infinite emotional universe that binds or divides people, depending of the type of connections established. Few, in truth, are the traits that allow to the eye of the observer to capture events and details. Like to think that to the artist is dear to express the universe of the affections through a clean and essential feature that does not need additions or superabundances. It is a sure, fast, quick gesture, at least as much as that of who it meets, who quickly comes into contact with the other to reapply, however, in the fastest way possible, of their own space and their lived intimate experience. An encounter of lines, of graphic features, goes to impresses the canvas, obtaining exactly what the artist expected; the foregrounding of an affective situation that, as such, expresses itself through a few quick gestures before dissolving into the transparency that necessarily the emotional situations require.
By art historian Elene Gradini
Artreview by the Italian art critic Dott. Salvatore Russo, July 2015 - according the Award «Premio della Critica 2015»:
An artist who manipulates the sign. This is Kari Elisabeth Haug. An artist able to paint the silence of the world. The reality that she choses to represent, is a reality that Kari has in mind and heart. An extraordinary reality, made of beautiful colors and a high signic synthesis. Its lines run through a new milky way and lead the observer into the beautiful paradise.
Artreview by the Italian art critic Dott. Salvatore Russo, March 2015
Kari Elisabeth Haug
"A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind", I want to start from this quote from Eugene Ionesco, to explain the art of Kari Elisabeth Haug. An art that for years, is fighting against figural prejudice; an art that, through his informal writing, reveals to us the most intimate confessions, that the artist chooses to share with us. Scratches of the soul. Dilemmas of the psyche. Hamletic doubts and chromatic dances. These are the main characteristics of a painting that has in Kari Elisabeth Haug its maximum interpreter. An abstract painting that weaves its sign frames elaborations on canvas. A painting that explores the dark places of the human mind and casts the riddles. In Haug we find a linguistic power capable of binding the meaning and the signifier subtended of things. Narratives, which have the same evocative power of the divine laws. Sign and chromatic narratives able to seduce the mind of the observer, bringing him as well, to make that intangible trip, that sees the soul becoming detached from the body and exploring new worlds. Worlds in which the Art is the absolute Queen. An art that of Kari Elisabeth Haug made mainly of an essential signic, but which brings with it very complex meanings. In this art can be seen throughout the creative power of the painter action paintings. A painting that lets itself be guided by the genius of the instinct. A painting whose strength is represented by the strong gestures. As the biggest informal artists, Kari, expresses the great power of its sentiments. A painting that encloses screamed emotions, and dramas whose philosophy is to search for in the mind of the artist. A mind that explores the infinite, and then reporting the extreme synthesis. A fundamental role in the artist's works, is occupied by colors. The colors, in the narrated of Haug, always has positive implications. No pragmatism or cosmic pessimism. A light that obscures the darkness and shines more beautiful than ever. The painting of Haug, is a painting of hope. Testimony to this, are the titles that the artist chooses for her works. Works such as "Keep on telling", "Hope", "Existence", are the invitation to continue to believe in life. The painting of Kari Elisabeth Haug, is, therefore, the painting of the hope. A painting that tells us that, beyond the horizon, there is a new light, that will lead us to eternal salvation.
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Artreview by Persis May Singh, NY
The Art Of Kari Elisabeth Haug
As an artist constantly working, evolving and producing painter and artist extraordinary Kari Elisabeth Haug establishes herself once again as an artistic force to be reckoned with. A powerful painter Haug’s overture places her with the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Lynne Frehm and Helen Frankenthaler. Yet, while Haug’s paintings have the swirling energy of many great abstract expressionist painters, they also suggest something quite different: the murmuring of numerous voices beneath each layer. The artist’s work has changed greatly over the years, and is seldom truly abstract.
She courageously goes beyond the given and familiar, pioneering new techniques and materials in order to expand her own vision. Many of Haug’s works are exemplary of her penchant for monolithic, eccentric, dynamic forms, and bursts of emotion. Her art is impulsive but not violent—and more seductive than confrontational. Haug's works don’t want to assault you, but suck you into their oceanic swirl, carry you along for the ride. The magic emerges in the tension between control and spontanety, and the result is invariably surprising, open-ended, poetic, and spiritual. In the majority of works the artist creates an explosion of color. A master of color, Haug is equally adept in her use of pure white. In "Kjærlighetsbåndet (meaning The Knob of Love)" and “The Circle of Life” Haug uses white to both invade and neuter the surrounding cacophony of colors, the artist’s intent is to block out the outside world in order to give the viewer space in which to roam freely.
Born into Norway, Haug was raised in an environment with a strong emphasis on music, literature, astrology, and the arts. Haug studied teaching, focusing her attentions toward literature, music, nature and outdoor activities, playing the piano and writing poetry. Still based in Europe Kari Elisabeth Haug has shown her paintings around the world, including The Oslo Art fair and the Florence Biennale. Shifting between two approaches—Devine Abstraction, and Romantic Expressionism—her oeuvre is compelling in its diversity. Her painterly approach revolves around the uncovering the spirit of each color. She paints intuitively, instinctually coloring her canvases in bright palettes of brilliant hues. Inspired by the natural world, she infuses her works with a Zen-like spirit of harmony and balance. In fact, it is this kind of spirituality that motivates her work. According to Haug, her work acts as an interface between the physical and spiritual realms, and inspires healing and transformation of the soul. Many viewers of her work have even commented on a kind of energetic vibration that one may feel when absorbing one of her works. “The term is intuitive, often abstract. I am looking for a different reality than the sensuous reality around us,” Haug says. “I'm on the hunt for something else, a power, a source is a mystery I know I am a part, but I still can not quite comprehend”.
Certain works evokes a sense of vibrational fields of energy. Reminiscent of the intense cave paintings, as well as some of the abstract designs in the paintings of British artist Cecily Brown, like automatic drawing, the images resonate with a profound sense that the subconscious soul has been manifested in color and form. In "Landet bakenfor/The land beyond" and "The Vision", Haug portrays landscapes so simplified that they have been reduced to lines upon the horizon that is divided into distinct color fields- subtly blended streaks of shimmering color. This minimalist reduction is effective in its simplification of form, which like Platon’s ideal forms, function not as reality, but as an archetype of the land and sky which reside deep in our collective unconscious, as well as a representation of our deep connection with the earth. “The shape and composition is open, which symbolizes life and the individual who is in the process of constant development and change. It is the desire to focus on the power and energy every human being possesses,” Haug says.
This could not be truer, and we have Haug to thank for bringing the spirit of her visionary world into ours. Haug finds her ideology in the deep contours of creation. It is her acute love and understanding of color, composition, and positivity that lends comparisons to Picasso, Edvard Munch, Rothko, and Chagall.
Employing a strongly stylized painting method, the work is distinguished by layered shapes and elegant color. The artist’s figurative narratives are distinguished by dynamic, undulating, and lyrical brushstrokes combined with curved “whiplash” lines of syncopated rhythm. Charismatic and forceful, Haug’s use of seductive color, vibrant brushwork, and sinuous line highlight the development of the artist’s sense of freedom and her unique style. The tie linking Haug’s work is her overwhelming sense of fluid organic shape and swelling curvaceous line work, and her succulent approach to applying paint on canvas. Color and form undulate in florid feminine compositions that depict subjects ranging from shimmering, blossoming landscape, to delicately rendered dream-like visions. Haug’s strength of vision and personal style always resonate deeply within the recesses of the viewer’s heart and imagination.
Written by Art Historian Persis May Singh, New York, December 2011
Artreview by Paola Trevisan, IT
The Art Of Kari Elisabeth Haug
Kari Elisabeth Haug currently lives and works in Sande, in Norway and she has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally.
Through her studies and her passion for literature and music, she learned to let herself be transported by her own creative inspiration; refusing to accept the limitations imposed by rules, elements of style and formal techniques, she relies on her own imagination, using brushes to explore the surface of pictures and spaces linked to the sphere of emotions and memory, amusing herself by inventing forms and colours that give rise to refined, brilliant compositions, as though guided by a mysterious, rhythmic force. The artist confers a personal character to her own artistic research that, in continuous evolution, highlights more and more the abstract and the rhythmic elements constituted by lines, forms, paths, and spaces.
In her recent production, Kari Elisabeth Haug shows a careful study of colour and forms creating a soft and vibrant abstractionism. In this visual journey of refinedabstract imagery, skilful and selective articulation of the strokes, stages and spaces are constants, revealing an unceasing dialogue between the painter and the surface of the work. Through their evocative function which lack representative purpose, Kari’s paintings are guided by refined and continual aesthetic exploration, transmitting emotions instead of recording images. The temporal and spatial dimensions move closer together until they meet in a happy fusion that bears a unique and vibrant plot into which the spectators are free to insert themselves.
The abstract works created by the artist are impressive for their general harmony that while cleverly rhythmic in the effects, is fruit of a synthesis of colours, forms and textures. The dynamic expressiveness of the brushwork - that can be intense or intentionally contained - creates visual, chromatic and compositionally-balanced solutions, and thus, is fascinating. The balanced and ordered structure of the paintings still allows for fast and strong impulsivity and improvisations that reveal the intense tension of feelings within the painter, transferred on canvas and presenting the more instinctive side of her personality.
Kari Elisabeth Haug’s art reveal its refined force in the liveliness of colours, shapes' effects, textures, pictorial matter, and magnetic energy that the pictorial stroke releases from the canvas and images and also in inventing and elaborating the space and chromatic shades to attain lyric, harmonic and also mysterious informal results.
Paola Trevisan, Director of Trevisan International Art, Italy, 2010
Artreview by Lisa Bently, Art Approach, NY
Your work has an undertone of personal biography, addressing the issue of self through symbolism to express your own ideology, what results are gripping images rife with human emotion; complex forms and compositions are configured in forms of pure expressionism; at times rhythmic and other times fearlessly exposing the rawest elements of the human emotion.
A wide variety of artistic invention greets viewers of your work with classic, expressive, and highly stylized images that are almost sculptural in their depth and realism. I was actually talking to a colleague about the works today, and he was saying the idea of producing art that is this poetic is almost unheard of. It is simply fascinating!
The works are just beautiful- perhaps the most striking quality above all else in these works your work is the attention to the subtle and magical power of light, and the energy of composition. When combined with a focused subjectivity they engender luminescent surfaces that glow with a special radiance not usually encountered by work of this kind. There is an understated incandescence to these images that is nostalgic and mystical all at once. You position yourself in the theatrical realm through the dream-like fantastical quality of the imagery—almost Surreal, yet not quite there, as if some ghostly memory from a heavenly far-away place; producing a work which resonates with the viewer long after viewing.
I have to say, there is something deeply intense and critical in personal sensibilities and modalities of your beautiful art works and expressions. Your art somehow manages to muse and fuse the classical and the modern, the flat and the defined-it is personal biography meets movement, passion and a very physiological presence. Exhibiting an impeccable instinct for the emotionally evocative power of color, movement, texture, and shape, you shine as an artist whose work relates more to a state of mind, mood or feeling than a tangible object. Amidst a sea of art, you manage to say something very different. (2011)
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KARI ELISABETH HAUG AT THE SCHOOL OF EDVARD MUNCH
by proff. Costanzo Costantini (1924-2014, Italian author and specialist in art history and psychoanalysis)
The exhibition «Sognando Edvard Munch» (Dreaming Edvard Munch) was presented in
Galleria Tondinelli, Rome, 10.May - 5.June 2013.
"It has been eight months now that
he came into this clinic, Mr. Munch. I believe that an interview is not remanded any more. It is important that you tell me his thoughts because I would like to get you out as soon as possible, but for this I need you to talk to me".
"What I have to talk, Doctor?
"Oh, of what you want, it is a simple conversation"
"I do not want anything now. My only interest is the time of painting. "
"I would be delighted if you had the pleasure of talking of his paintings with a layman like me."
"It's not really my paintings, I want to talk about, but the technique, the way I paint them."
"If the conversation will be incomprehensible, I promise that I heckle it"
"I paint pictures, doctor, because that's what it was asked me.
The artist, as Nietzsche wrote, is nothing that an instrument of God".
"This metaphor not diminish his personal creativity."
"The claws of a bird of prey have penetrated into my heart. In return of the paintings I paint I was asked to give up on life, love and joy. And this is the covenant that God made with me".
"I can follow you perfectly."
"To live up to this will not be enough spread of the colors on the canvas, there is a series of paintings that are called to paint, but the request is how I will paint them. To be the bow of God I will have to look for sounds best for his creation is fulfilled. Years ago I had just finished painting The sick child, a framework in which I recalled all the grief for the death of my little sister Sophie, and I am sure that no other painter had an equal pain as it happened to me, it was then that I took a knife and began to injure the canvas to make it true to my heart. "
"This very interesting, please continue."
"Perhaps you think that mine is a kind of delirium selfish or narcissistic Nietzsche called cursed ipsissimosità But it is not so"
"I believe you"
"I want to say that with the knife I did not hurt the cloth, but myself."
"But do you think, doctor Nietzsche says that the comedy regards to God to men befits tragedy."
"Eternal return transmutation of all values: you're going above and beyond our already scandalous Ibsen and Strindberg."
The dialogue between Munch and Dr. Jacobson was rebuilt by Francesca Bonazzoli degree in art history and iconology, Deception in the monkey (Skira, 2OO6), based on writings and autobiographical memories of the Norwegian painter, and is therefore believed to be substantially reliable.
Born in I863 in Loten, Munch began painting under the influence of local painters of naturalistic tendency, but soon he went to France, Italy and Germany, where he remained longer than elsewhere. He found contact with the works of Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas and especially
knows expressionism, in its various expressions. In 1892 held in Berlin that draws our attention to him, especially in environments Die Bruche, with a trail of scandal.
The Munch's life is nothing but a long string of tragic events: five years old when his mother died, he was fourteen when he dies his sister Sophie, who has a year older than him; Subject to crises snowy and in 1908 was admitted to clinic for a collapse "Each of us has had a father, a mother or a sibling suffering from tuberculosis," he says with deep melancholy, if not deep anguish. The "deadly disease" of Kierkegaard memory, in the form of injury to the lungs. Despite the fact the heartbreaks, or perhaps because of it, can be defined as a visionary painter. How to teach Focillon, visionary painters, ranging from Tintoretto to Odilon, in Redon, have a more subtle aesthetic perception of the other painters, a special vision of the artistic phenomenon, Munch is not less than the others, including Rembrandt, Piranesi, Burri, Tapies.
It is known internationally for THE SCREAM, a mythical framework, slightly less than DAVID by Michelangelo, if not the GIOCONDA by Leonardo: Yet Francis Bacon, who had in mind to achieve the most beautiful picture of the human cry, He doesn’t even mention him. The most beautiful part of the human cry was made, according to him, Eisenstein, or the cry of the child in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and Poussin painting in the Massacre of the Innocents, the picture that was in Chantilly, and that every time he saw it, it gave him "a terrifying impression". Perhaps Bacon also he was a visionary painter, but of distorted visions, squinting, if not obscene. Although it was occasionally in Rome, he had never seen a painting by Caravaggio, had never even entered in St. Peter, because he was afraid to see the original of INNOCENT X by Velasquez, who considered the most beautiful picture of the world, after the alterations or which had made on the basis of photographic reproductions. He had seen the Uffizi, before it was damaged by the flood, the CRUCIFIXION by Cimabue but seeing "a worm that crawls on the cross." Bacon was accused of loving the horror, a charge he rejected, but Balthus, who knew him well, he was convinced that he was a painter "cursed." Many argue that there is a link between horror and beauty. "What is beauty I do not know," said Durer. But if you do not even know Bacon? It would be left with the horror.
I forgot Kari Elisabeth Haug, the main subject of this article. A disciple who does not exceed the Master is not a true disciple, "said Nietzsche. I do not mean that Elisabeth has passed the Master, but she is a real
disciple of Munch, absolutely to the point that the paiting she devoted to him very
well, it could be included in an exhibition alongside the works of the Master. The drawing very good, new, in a personal style. She i salso a visionary artist, with a fantasy power, so to speak. In addition Munch, remember Leonardo. "Everything is in the universe the painter it has first in the mind, then in his hands. "Leonardo also gave great importance to the moisture stains that form on the walls, because by them the artist can draw a variety of reasons and inspirations, like mountains, valleys, rivers, horizons, figures, characters, ghosts. About the colours Elisabeth recalls, as well as Van Gogh and Gauguin, the colorists loved by her Master, Cezanne. ("There is only one way to solve all the problems in painting: the color"): "Me and the color are one," said Paul Klee, who came from a musical family, his father played the piano as Elisabeth, Paul the violin.
The white of Elisabeth brings to mind certain paintings by the American painter James Wistler or some of the female portraits signed by Guttuso. About Munch has raised the issue that was no place for Morandi, the painter of the bottles, as it was commonly called or the problem of repetition. For the Italian painter of the sharpest critics had observed that between a picture and the other there were some differences, albeit subtle; Approximately Munch has been called into question even Kierkegaard, that elevates an ode to repetition. He writes the danish philosopher in his essay "Repetition": "The only love happy is that of repetition." The two authors cited by Dr. Jacobson, Ibsen, R. Strindberg, Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism. KARI ELISABETH HAUG she is an existentialist painter, as he was so unique, Edvard Munch.
HAPPY INTUITION of Floriana Tondinelli to call the exhibition "Dreaming EDVAR MUNCH"...
Informasjon om Costanzo Costantini here