(Translated from norwegian)
Erlend Grytbakk Wold clearly belongs to the growing circle of younger artists who immerse themselves in a modernist-inspired visual language. In his current exhibition at Golsa, 14 works are displayed, with one exception, featuring watercolor paints and embroidery on canvas. The expression is a nostalgic abstraction in compositions of vertical and horizontal lines and more or less geometric, rectangular surfaces and stripes. The paintings are technically collages or patchworks. A large number of canvas pieces in various sizes and shapes are meticulously sewn together and then stretched over the frame. Some pieces are painted with an airbrush beforehand, while others have color applied afterward so that the color composition and the assembly of fabric pieces overlap. Certain areas have a baroque and intricate pattern embroidered into the canvas, which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be based on Wold’s own handwriting and signature.
Sensitive Exploration
The result is delicate, vibrating surfaces and soft color transitions—the product of different mixtures of the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. The treatment is pleasant to the eye, suitably decorative, and immediately perceived as somewhat unchallenging in its aesthetics. On the surface, the exhibition’s artistic reasoning seems to stop at picture-building formalism; a sensitive exploration of tiny nuances within this surface, something the predecessors of the "neo-modernists" paved the way for nearly a century ago. Think Bauhaus, or artists like Sophie Taeuber, or a kind of 1920s neoplasticism—Mondrian’s and Theo van Doesburg’s asymmetrical arrangements of vertical and horizontal forms in primary colors—in tuned earth and pastel tones.
Seemingly, Wold’s workdays are about exploring the nearly infinite landscape of shifts and subtle differences in composition and color. These are the kinds of paintings that can elevate and complete a stylish interior, but Wold’s interest naturally lies elsewhere. Nor is it the kind of work that easily becomes contemporary art; it needs a more sophisticated justification to avoid ending up in the decorative arts department.
The Grandfather’s Legacy
In Wold’s case, the artistic motivation is more personal and biographical than the paintings initially suggest. The starting point for the works at Golsa, and several of Wold’s other exhibitions in recent years, are unused canvases he inherited from his grandfather, the notable painter Roar Wold. With this, we are also deeply embedded in Norwegian art history. Grandfather Roar was part of the Trondheim-based artist group Gruppe 5, which in the 1960s distinguished itself with a continental modernism on central Norwegian soil. Their work as artists and teachers at the architecture school at the technical university was "built on a visual order, a post-Bauhaus abstraction with fundamental principles in construction and structure," as the Trondheim Art Museum describes Wold, Håkon Bleken, Lars Tiller, and their contemporaries.
This provides both a conceptual and personal, slightly sentimental justification for Wold's work that elevates it beyond the undeniably skilled but also routine and meticulously programmatic handling of visual and material elements. Wold’s paintings invite contemplation on the balance of order and potential chaos within the surface and how this can be meaningful in itself. At the same time, the exhibition opens for reflections on the passage of generations, artistic heritage, and aesthetic trends and manifestos as they continuously emerge, disappear, and make their return.
