“Oslo in the summer time”, a bubbly song by an
artful band from Athens Georgia cross- borderly called Of Montreal, freshly
describes the avant-calm of the city.
In a pre-summer morning of
late May, the easy breathable air sets it self for the perfect anonymous walk
into the walls of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, where I could
determine how right a friend is every time he says “better little of what is
good”.
This is the realm of what a
true, elegant and prosperous enclave can offer to the disperse art-hungry
public that visits the institution’s building complex, this time through a show
called “Surrounding Bacon & Warhol”, two pillars of 20th century
art, paralleled by their own separate and dissimilar, speaking in a redundantly
modern way, visionary visions and creations.
Adventurous as it can seem to
be, the compilation of works dissolves it self into a Pastel of Expressionist
and Pop pieces, an audacious visual compendious of images, textures and canvas
by a group of artists, carefully and daringly selected by the hermeneutic
parallelism between their works and the exhibited pieces by violently visceral
Francis and reproductive Andy.
After trespassing the
entrance and looking around, the first glance astonishes the most indifferent
and impermeable critic: late Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm and
Madonna (after Edward Munch) (1984). A dark painting that fusions a sober,
rather prompt Munch, accompanied by a “darkholian” reproduction of Edward’s
Madonna, armless and obscured by an alien faced figure which seems about to
explode and scream, here’s one clever and crucial curatorial node: Warhol’s
expressionism via Munch.
As the exhibition continues,
and the public, only me, crashes into the textures of Anselm Kiefer’s Ladder to
the Sky (1991) an instinctive and tenuous painting that gives way to a big hall
which shelters the former Joseph Beuys student’s Zweistormland / The High
Priestess, a book-shelved, abandoned library shaped sculpture, an ode to the
post-war German art which Kiefer explicitly presents and happens to be
magnanimously deployed before a rounded armed concrete wall that stands behind
it, an exponential succession of sepia and grey sculptured tones.
Leaving that pleasant
war-tiredness rather dark scenery, a new vista of up coloured fresher panorama
welcomes in the following room: a group
of school girls attentively listening to their art teacher, a middle aged woman
who looked an sounded like an art teacher, while explaining the contents of the
show to students and commenting it to the sympathetic and good looking girls
working as museum assistants.
Within this context, and
pleased by the scents of shampoo that Norway’s clean air lets flow in a room
with more that ten washed hairs can leave on a sensitive nose, the presence of
Gerhard Richter’s Frau Niepenberg (1965) stands in franc blurry consonance with
Warhol’s Big Electric Chair exhibited in the next room: a second and pertinent
curatorial node.
At this point, the show
becomes an intended statement starting to get rounded: In one hand, the English
Pop apparition by David Hockney’s Colgated tooth paste Oil-Canvas Cleaning
Teeth, Early Evening (10 pm) (1962), dialoguing with Warhol´s Jim Dime’s Fixing
the Lights and Objects of My Vanity (1972); both Pop-Art emergence
contemporaries patronized by fabulously conceived Tarzan, Jane, Boy and Cheetah
(1966-1975) Peter Blake’s only but intelligently chosen work for the show.
In a centred communicated
room, at this time with the company of an Italian couple, two arty looking
middle aged Norwegian men, and with the sound of naughty giggles of the
dissipated school girl trip disbanded all around the museum, Warhol’s master
pieces: Funky Era Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), Mid-Cold War conceived Hammer
and Sickle (1976), and pre-mortem Rorschach (1984) and intense eyed Self
Portrait (Flight Wig) (1976), perfect exhibition wrap ups, which round up the
Pop Genius supported side of the show, while leaving, on the other hand,
(Bacon’s Hand) a mixture of tropical
(Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield); darky norwegian (Olav Christopher Jensen,
Björn Sigurd Tufta) and Martin Kipperberger’s German expressionism, a bracketed
flavour of an obvious surrounding maxima:
Pop matters.
