Kunsthall Stavanger is proud to present the first survey show of Lina Viste Grønli's work in Norway. Viste Grønli (b. 1976 in Stavanger) has exhibited at several contemporary art spaces in Norway and internationally during the last ten years. Tinging is en ambitious presentation of old and new works, where focus will be on presenting a red thread through works anchored in language, and deconstruction of language as narrative form. By producing sculpture, photography and performance, Viste Grønli explores collective references, appropriation and collage, semantics and semiotics.
The exhibition title, Tinging (Norwegian for thinging), takes its name from a personal reading of Martin Heidegger's saying that the thing things, and the idiosyncratic inflection thinging. Other examples of this might be the chair chairs, the object objects, the sculpture sculptures, etc. What the thing does when it is thinging is that it attracts other things. Examples of this
Kunsthall Stavanger is proud to present the first survey show of Lina Viste Grønli's work in Norway. Viste Grønli (b. 1976 in Stavanger) has exhibited at several contemporary art spaces in Norway and internationally during the last ten years. Tinging is en ambitious presentation of old and new works, where focus will be on presenting a red thread through works anchored in language, and deconstruction of language as narrative form. By producing sculpture, photography and performance, Viste Grønli explores collective references, appropriation and collage, semantics and semiotics.
The exhibition title, Tinging (Norwegian for thinging), takes its name from a personal reading of Martin Heidegger's saying that the thing things, and the idiosyncratic inflection thinging. Other examples of this might be the chair chairs, the object objects, the sculpture sculptures, etc. What the thing does when it is thinging is that it attracts other things. Examples of this are the sculpture-series The Thing Things, and Thinging, both from 2012. These sculptures, which resemble classic modernistic explorations in copper and brass on marble plinths, are filled with kids' stickers in several motives, shapes and sizes.This action might resemble a kids hand getting free access to make the thing his or her own through adding his or her thing to the thing. Simultanously, the original thing (or sculpture) looses its identity and autonomity and becomes something else. The objects are placed on top of each other as a form of ownership or heretical assemblage, and such becomes a third thing.
In 2012, Viste Grønli vas chosen by New York Percent for Art to produce a sculpture to be placed permanently at Trygve Lie Plaza outside the UN headquarter in New York, to commemorate UN's first General Secretary and Norwegian Trygve Lie. The prominent sculptress Barbara Hepworths sculpture Single Form (1961-64) is also placed permanently outside the UN building, to commemorate UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld. When Viste Grønli grew up in Stavanger, she played in Hepworth's sculpture Figure for Landscape, which has been on permanent display outside Kunsthall Stavanger's building since the early 70's. These parallells sprung the idea for Viste Grønli's sculpture Peanuts for Barbara, to be placed outside the kunsthall in close vicinity to Figure for Landscape. The sculpture is a two meter high peanut, made in wood, to serve as a personal and ode to Hepworth's integrity when it comes to form and abstraction.
The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Paris.
b. 1976
Lina Viste Grønli lives and works in Boston, USA. She has exhibited at MAK – Museum for Applied Art, Wien; Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht; Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussel; Performa 09, New York; Sunday Art Fair, London; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum; and Gaudel de Stampa, Paris.
