OSLO — Look carefully on the work of Else Hagen and beneath the rainbow of festive colour lurk clouds of feminist angst. A mom ignores her taking part in kids as warplanes hover exterior. A girl in garter belts glares within the mirror whereas prepping for a tryst. A gaggle of women huddle beneath a tree, their heads dolefully going through on the floor.
Finest identified in Norway for her monumental installations within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, Hagen warrants equal, and overdue, consideration for her intimate midcentury oil work. These canvases are the throbbing coronary heart of Else Hagen: Between Individuals on the Nationwide Museum, the late artist’s first museum retrospective. A extra becoming subtitle is perhaps “Between Women” for the way typically Hagen plumbed the tensions, envies, frustrations, and tender bonds amongst female topics.
In “The Secret” (1945), 4 women tower over an open ebook, their curled our bodies forming a vibrant mass of yellow, orange, and purple. Sitting to their left, a woman with a sable bob watches silently, one naked foot crossed behind the opposite. Exterior the circus-hued room, a darkish crowd of hatted males transfer on, oblivious. However contained in the domicile, the uncovered pages counsel a stolen diary, a younger girl’s innermost ideas out there for others’ amusement or judgment.
Else Hagen, “Floral Priest Collar” (1956/57), oil on canvas, ∼44 x 32 3/4 inches (112 x 83 cm)
The complicated feminine psychology depicted in Hagen’s vibrant, disquieting work feels defiantly forward of its time. That is partly as a result of her work speaks to the interiorities of girls whose frequent plights — being ostracized, humiliated, sexualized, infantilized, and alienated throughout the home sphere — are so typically relegated to the background, if not outright rejected as content material worthy of inventive consideration. Hagen’s feminist consciousness shouldn’t be rooted in a romanticized imaginative and prescient of peaceable matriarchs and sisterly daisy chains. In “Floral Priest Collar” (1956/7), a lone younger girl dons solely a flower necklace and paper skirt, and blocks her face behind her arms, as if to say, “You can’t have me” to the passing viewer.
Hagen’s girls maintain secrets and techniques, break oaths, gossip, and play video games simply as they hyperlink arms, feed kids, get bored, and get frisky. The artist grants female experiences the depth and dignity they deserve and honors the perimeters that outline them. Girls usually are not heroes or saints, however flawed people navigating grueling, if typically banal, challenges. It’s no shock to be taught that, in the course of the “housewife era” in Norway, Hagen doggedly pursued, and achieved, a profession as a outstanding visible artist even after turning into a spouse and mom, encouraging different girls of her time to do the identical. “For a while,” the artist as soon as stated of her expertise throughout the Nineteen Fifties, “shaking myself and my fellow women out of slumber and apathy became almost as important to me as making paintings.”
Else Hagen, “The Roles Assigned” (1950), oil on canvas, ∼63 x 78 inches (160 x 198 cm)
In “Self-Portrait” (1940) — painted when Hagen was solely 26 years previous, newly married, and 4 years away from having her first little one — one half of her face is a heat salmon and the opposite half an icy teal. Simply as extraordinary as the colour is that this girl’s subtly imperious expression. Her gaze is barely downcast, her free hair catching a sliver of solar. She seems to be effortlessly stylish however considerably pensive. She is, like Hagen’s physique of labor, unabashedly fashionable.
Else Hagen, “Self-Portrait” (1940), oil on canvas, ∼16 1/3 x 12 3/4 inches (41.5 x 32.3 cm)
Else Hagen, “Family” (1950), oil on canvas, ∼41 3/4 x 32 1/4 inches (106 x 82 cm)
Else Hagen: Between Individuals continues on the Nationwide Museum Norway (Brynjulf Bulls plass, Oslo, Norway) by means of January 26. The exhibition was organized by Stavanger Artwork Museum, Trondheim kunstmuseum, Kunstsilo, and the Nationwide Museum and curated by Øystein Ustvedt.
