Kings Place

Nicolaus Widerberg: Past in Future

1 October - 28 November 08

It could hardly be more appropriate that Nicolaus Widerberg’s first one-man show in London should take place at the new architecturally outstanding Kings Place Gallery. Extravagantly gifted, Widerberg has exhibited throughout Europe, Scandinavia in particular, as well as the USA and comes from one of Norway’s most distinguished artistic families. His father Frans, for instance, has long been acknowledged as the foremost figurative painter since Edvard Munch.

Defiantly independent, Nicolaus Widerberg is also relentlessly inventive. Having reinvigorated neo-classicism by producing sculpture which exists in a continuum accommodating Middle Kingdom Egyptian, Hellenistic and archaic art his work remains unmistakably of today.

After graduating from the Academy in Oslo, he continued his studies in France and in 1984 travelled to Italy where he worked alongside the jobbing masons of the Carrara quarries, quickly learning to identify cut stone by its smell. While in Italy he also developed an interest in the work of Marino Marini and Mimmo Paladino, important additions to his personal pantheon of artists including Moore, Rodin, Ipousteguy, Picasso and Giacometti.

Widerberg’s predominantly still and monolithic pillar figures clearly have a kinship with Giacometti’s elongated presences, but Paladino with his insouciant reintroduction to sculpture of narrative, myth and surrealist invention has arguably had the greater influence. Radical changes of scale and daring combinations of materials are other influences. There is also Nico’s continual concern for materials and processes, his experiments at the Hadeland Glassworks yielding some remarkable iridescent glass torsos which, paradoxically, seem to be both solid presences and apparitions.

Of his intentions he once remarked, “My goal is to produce strength, communicate energy: There is something about creating something living out of an inanimate material. I try to give life to something dead, which comes to life – it’s a sort of cycle.”

In his catalogue essay William Varley describes this as “beings in a state of suspended animation; hence their timelessness. As in fairy tales, if you kissed them they would wake, breathe, move and talk."

Exhibition Curator: Mara-Helen Wood, Director, Northumbria University Gallery

Touring to the University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
5 June - 17 July 2009: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery/

Watch a video on Nicolaus Widerberg here

Please contact the gallery for further information and prices. 

Exhibition Open / Monday – Saturday 10am – 7.30 pm / Sunday 11am – 6.30pm / Admission Free

www.nicowiderberg.no

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