Nordic Modernism Gets a Fresh Reading at Kunstsilo
At Kunstsilo in Norway, three exhibitions are bringing renewed attention to the artists who helped shape Nordic modernism — and to the personal histories that gave their work its force. The museum, custodian of the Tangen Collection, is using the shows to trace how abstraction, color, and avant-garde experimentation took root across the region.
Among the central figures is Jakob Weidemann, a Norwegian artist (1923–2001) who became one of the defining voices of post-war modernism in Norway. He served in the resistance during World War II, escaped to Sweden in 1944, and was left partially blind after a severe explosives accident. That altered vision sharpened his relationship to color. In the late 1950s, he began developing his skogbunn, or forest floor, paintings — non-figurative works that turn nature into layered, tactile fields. In Autumn Leaves (1959), the image emerges only gradually from rough, tessellated planes of pigment. Later paintings such as Crocus (1974) and Towards the Light (1976) move toward a brighter, more fractured surface language.
Gösta Adrian Nilsson, known as GAN (1884–1965), offers a different route into modernism. The Swedish artist moved through Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Futurism before settling into Cubism, where his fascination with machinery found its clearest form. Cranes, locomotives, and laboring bodies appear on equal footing in his compositions, flattened into dynamic geometry. His work also carries a queer dimension: from around 1917, industrial scenes gave way to angular sailors drawn from nights spent cruising the docks and from a relationship with a young Swedish Navy torpedo operator. Those figures culminated in his 1918 exhibition “Sjömanskompositioner” at Gummesson’s art gallery in Stockholm.
Sigrid Hjertén (1885–1948) was one of the key conduits for Henri Matisse’s color theories in Scandinavia. After studying at the Académie Matisse from 1908 to 1911, she married Isaac Grünewald in 1911 and developed a Fauvist palette of unnatural, often vivid color. Her 1912 exhibition with De Åtta marked her official entry into the art world. The work is intimate and stylized, ranging from domestic figures to landscapes in Denmark and Paris.
Bendik Riis (1911–1988) rounds out the picture as an outlier in Norwegian art history, shaped by a troubled personal history and a limited place in the international canon. Taken together, the exhibitions suggest that Nordic modernism was never a peripheral story. It was a site where European avant-garde ideas were tested, translated, and made distinctly local.
