Turi Gramstad Oliver "Kretsløpet"
Frida Siegrist Oliver (viola) and Eirik Siegrist Oliver (flute) will play for all who attend.
About the exhibition
The exhibition presents artworks and unique functional art from Turi Gramstad Oliver's practice, spanning from the 1960s to the present day. The selected works range from grand appliqué pieces created for public spaces to objects intended for everyday use in private lives and homes. "Kretsløpet" offers a rare opportunity to experience the different phases of an entire artistic career and the continuous oscillations between materials, methods and modes of expression, and to see an artist's thematic focus evolve over the course of a long-standing practice.
Throughout her career, Turi Gramstad Oliver has moved freely between the materials of textile and paper. She considers painting and drawing on canvas to belong as much to the sphere of textile art as to that of painting. She brings media together in a distinctive expression where embroidery is blended with brushstrokes and pencil lines. The techniques she employs help bring to life the plant world described in many of her works. She has reclaimed a number of her own finished pieces by cutting them up, sewing them together anew and embroidering further on them. The works perish and re-emerge in a material cycle that bears a resemblance to nature's own organic processes. Several of these reworked pieces appear in the exhibition as sculptures that also function as everyday objects. Her use of fragmented textile materials as ingredients in the production of her own paper is the strongest example of the artist's fusion of media. These experiments have resulted in works that completely dissolve the boundaries between paper-based and textile-based art. Pieces in the exhibition show several different approaches to this material exploration of textile in encounter with paper.
Throughout her career, Turi Gramstad Oliver has travelled to and stayed in many different countries. Destinations such as Egypt, the Shetlands and Rome have resulted in series of works in the exhibition where she captures her experience of the surroundings and the people she encountered on her journeys. Through various visual approaches, she expresses these interpersonal encounters and allows herself to be shaped by the aesthetic atmosphere of each country.
Through her art, Turi Gramstad Oliver has an ability to show the grand alongside the close and everyday. Facets of contemporary culture become visible as we study her painstaking descriptions of her own lived life, set in relation to her ornamental interpretations of nature, culture and familiar mythological narratives.
Jane Sverdrupsen
Director, Rogaland Kunstsenter
About the artist
Turi Gramstad Oliver (b. 1938) from Sandnes is an acclaimed textile artist who has developed her own distinctive expression with pictorial tapestries in appliqué and machine embroidery. The tapestries have a rich palette and motifs that move between the figurative and the abstract. In several works, her knowledge of and interest in mythology is clearly present. Fairy tales and myths have served as a source of inspiration. She has been able to perceive a connection between the fates of humans and those of animals and nature.
She is unique in her command of ornamentation and decorative design. In 1979 she completed a large textile commission for the Music Conservatory in Bergen. The same year, she was accepted with textile work into the Annual Exhibition of Norwegian Crafts. She was moving away from ceramics and design, for which she was renowned, and into the new textile art. Here too, with success.