Opening reception with the artist on Saturday September 16, 12-3pm.

Jan Groth´s first exhibition in our new spaces at Arbins gate 7, will focus on recent drawings and sculptures produced for this year’s International Festival Exhibition at the Bergen Kunsthall, curated by Martin Clark and Steinar Sekkingstad. Clark says about these works:

These two media in, different ways, continue to express Groth’s distinctive combination of the immediate and the gradual… While the drawings appear intuitively improvised — composed at the moment the black crayon meets the paper — the sculptures are the result of a slower process; from layered modelling to finished bronze cast...Within this range, between the intimacy of the individual drawing and the architecture of the exhibition, Groth composes a totality that can be read as a many-faceted ‘spatial drawing’. The vibrant black line is played out not only against the surface of the sheet, but also against the surface of the wall and the three-dimensionality of the space.

In the Festival Exhibition one could, for the first time, see Groth’s monumental drawings executed directly on the wall. These new works echo the scale of the tapestries that he made in collaboration with Benedikte Groth until 2006. For this exhibition, these wall drawings have been adapted to the architecture of Galleri Riis.

In addition to a suite of 23 small drawings on paper, the Bergen Kunsthall exhibition premiered a series of 10 distinctly new drawings made on a paper format slightly more horizontal than usual for the artist. A selection of these will be on view, as well as the Maquettes for the two large freestanding bronze sculptures, Open and Closed.

Groth´s new wall-leaning bronze sculptures feature shapes suggesting bodies or figures. Presented as a group they resemble ancient tools or weapons ready to be picked up and used.
Sculpture VIII, 2017, with sensual curves and smooth skin, occupies its’ own realm.

• The exhibition catalogue from Bergen Kunsthall, with written contributions by Martin Clark, Steinar Sekkingstad, Richard Tuttle, and an interview with Jan Groth by Fredrik Værslev, is available at the gallery and at bergen@kunsthall.no.