The use of a flat surface, possibly a canvas, along with line, form, and color, are among the few tools available to the visual artist to create a work.

Text by Gunnar Danbolt

The great German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin claimed that art arises from art. This was a radical assertion one hundred years ago, because according to Romanticism and modernism art should come from within the artist, uninfluenced by exterior factors. Art was expression, not imitation; the expression of a unique personality and therefore original.

Ingrid W. Berven | Lillian Presthus
Curated by Bjørn Inge Follevaag

They are also keys to understanding their works on a human, political, social and emotional level. From my point of view as curator intuition, the lived body, empathy and morals may in a meta-perspective be used to describe universal the universal aspects of Berven/Presthus’ oevre.

When one of the world’s leading art museums planned a retrospective exhibition of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944, known for his highly simplified compositions of red, yellow, and blue squares), the art experts chose to completely ignore the painter’s naturalistic flower paintings from the period before he became intellectually inaccessible. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York, only one question remained for painting to answer in 1995: What is a painting?

By Liv Falck

Lillian Presthus’s art involves us – not because she debates contemporary issues, but because she focuses on eternal human themes.