In After The Masters, Vilde Salhus Røed has reconstructed silkscreen frames in a way that mimics what they might have looked like after being used by other artists. She has coated several layers of ink in the frames and let to dry, as well as printed without motifs from the screens, and without washing away previous layers of ink between each printing. The large frames contain traces of the silkscreen process, but without references to the artist or the art work it´s trying look like. After The Masters, is a reconstruction of silkscreen frames in the way Salhus Røed thinks it must have looked like.
The watercolor-like silkscreen prints of After The Masters (wet –on-wet series) plays on how Salhus Røed, as a child, learned to paint with floating paint on wet sheets of paper. The assignment was often to mimic well known artist´s figurative paintings, but she was unable to make these prints look close enough to the originals. As in After The Masters, Salhus Røed has also printed without motif in the screen and let the traces of the process be what creates the images.
Even though both the silkscreen frames and the wet-on-wet prints look abstract, they make up the concrete expression of the process involved in the production. The focus on process and materiality has been the starting point for several of Salhus Røed´s photographic projects, and in After The Masters she has transferred this way of working to screenprinting; a technique in which she has little experience to begin with. Salhus Røeds´ works are often based in photographic challenges, where archive and recycling of material make up key elements in several of her projects. In After The Masters she is going a step further; the works make up the reconstructions of frames and prints as if she had found them.
Vilde Salhus Røed (born 1981) lives and works in Bergen, where she is a member of Flaggfabrikken – Center for Photography and Contemporary Art. Salhus Røed received her MA in Art from Bergen Academy of Art And Design in 2008 and has studied philosophy at the University of Bergen and Oslo. Exhibitions includes Preus Museum (Horten), Trondheim Kunstforening (Trondheim), Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Platform Stockholm (Stockholm), Entrée (Bergen), Sørlandets Kunstmuseum (Kristiansand), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (København), The Woodmill (London) and KODE (Bergen). Salhus Røed is also the leader of Hordaland Visual Artists and is one of the co-founders of Bergen Ateliergruppe in 2009.
The exhibition is supported by Norwegian Arts Council.