Two different images are juxtaposed in the exhibition:
Pillar figures, which stretch from floor to ceiling, and the sharply defined contour of a white waterfall against a black mountainside.
The five large works are silk screen prints. Six smaller waterfalls are painted on paper.
The image I call Pillar Figure depicts human figures from art history. One is a caryatid, a classical pillar in the form of a female figure from around 430 B.C. The others are young girls painted by Munch around 1905. The figures are photocopied from books, cut out, and taped together to form collages. These are then transposed to silk screens and printed.
The three young girls from modern times have the same frontal, free-standing pose as the pillar figure from the Acropolis. Standing in her place, they are given a kind of task. They too are suddenly classical. With hats and aprons, they become solid stanchions of support. They belong to art history, but are also nature and human, which makes the weight they bear recognizable.
Those who carry the weight of a beam on their heads disclose a critical point where forces meet. One day the pillar will fall, but not yet. At one point a flowing river tips over in the landscape into a free fall. There it freezes into its own contour, a white pillar on the mountainside.
Mari Slaattelid (b. 1960) studied at the Academies of Fine Art in Bergen and Oslo, as well as at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her exhibitions include solo shows at Bergen Kunsthall, Astrup Fearnley Museum, the National Gallery, and numerous solo and group exhibitions at galleries and major institutions throughout the Nordic region. In 2000, she won the Carnegie Art Award for Nordic contemporary art. Her work is represented in the collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), the Danish National Gallery (Denmark), Kiasma National Gallery (Finland), the National Museum, KODE Art Museums in Bergen, the Astrup Fearnley Museum, and Stavanger Art Museum, among others.
Slaattelid lives and works in Oslo. She is represented by STANDARD (OSLO).