Hannah Ryggen

With her monumental tapestries the artist Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) created a powerful, political inspired oeuvre, working from a small self-sufficient farm on the west coast of Norway. She launched spectacular visual attacks on Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini and made powerful statements of support to the victims of Fascism and National Socialism. On the occasion of Norway’s year as Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2019, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is dedicating the Swedish-Norwegian artist a major monographic exhibition that will provide the first in-depth insight into her oeuvre to the German public. With the about 25 tapestries presented Ryggen takes on the fundamental issues of life in our society: the atrocities of war, the abuse of power, the dependence on nature and the relation to family as well as fellow men and women. Many of her large-scale political works comment on the events and political debates in the 1930s and ’40s, with the artist’s socialist beliefs shining through. The exhibition aims to explore how Ryggen represents a different kind of modernism; a modernism where elements from folk art and mythology are mixed with issues from contemporary life. She explored an entirely new range of motifs while using a traditional medium for an unprecedented purpose: making portable murals that communicated her potent political messages to the public. Hannah Ryggen’s works resonate in our time of increasing inequality, nationalism, and strongmen, and are an uncanny reminder of the need to fight for the principles of humanism.

CURATORS Dr. Marit Paasche, Oslo and Esther Schlicht, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

You will find more information about the exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.