Hannah Ryggen's (1894-1970) art will be exhibited at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from September 2019 to January 2020. The exhibition is part of Norway's cultural programme as Guest of Honour.
– The cultural programme is an essential part of the Norwegian presentation as Guest of Honour. We are thrilled to share one of its highlights with you: From September 2019 to January 2020 the acclaimed artist Hannah Ryggen’s art will be presented at Schirn Kunsthalle. The most considerable presentation of her work in Germany. We are confident that this exhibition will gain substantial attention, says Marit Ingvill Sande, Cultural Programme Coordinator in Norway’s Guest of Honour team.
Art historian and curator, Marit Paasche, curates the exhibition in cooperation with the Schirn Kunsthalle. Paasche has researched Hannah Ryggen’s artwork for many years and wrote the book Hannah Ryggen. En fri (Pax, 2016), who won the Critics Prize for best nonfiction book for adults the same year. This book is published in English by Thames and Hudson and will be available in September 2019 with the title Hannah Ryggen. Threads of Defiance
Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, the National Museum for Decorative Arts and Design, is the main lender for the exhibition.
About Hannah Ryggen
Hannah Ryggen’s (1894-1970) tapestries connects the private and the political spheres in an extraordinarily way. She is considered to be one of the most significant Nordic artists from the 20th century. Several of the works show her reactions to important international political events, such as Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and the Nazi’s imprisonment of Ossietzky. In 2012 some of her tapestries were showcased at documenta, the prestigious international contemporary art show in Kassel, Germany. This presentation led to a significant increase in the international art scene’s interest for her work.
One of the most recent exhibition of her work was at Modern Art Oxford in October 2017. The exhibition received substantial international press: Brilliant reviews in The Guardian and New York Times, as well as a programme at BBC Radio(the review starts at 22:20). British Vogue recommended it as one of 10 «exhibitions worth travelling for».
Please read more about Hannah Ryggen here: https://nkim.no/en/hannah-ryggen
About Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Schirn Kunsthalle is one of the most important arts institutions in Europe. They create highly acclaimed and outstanding exhibitions, and collaborate with influential museums around the world. Schirn Kunsthalle opened in 1986 and has held 220 exhibitions in the 2000 m2 exhibition space. Since its opening, the museum has had more than 8 million visitors and 220 exhibitions. The most visited exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle was the Edvard Munch exhibition "The Modern Eye" in 2012.
Schirn Kunsthalle's description of the coming exhibition:
HANNAH RYGGEN
26 SEPTEMBER – 12 JANUARY 2020
Working from a small self-sufficient farm on the west coast of Norway, the artist Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) created with her monumental tapestries a powerful, political inspired Oeuvre. 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 turn as Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2019, the 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 30 tapestries presented Ryggen takes on the fundamental concerns of life in our society: the atrocities of war, abuse of power, our dependence on nature, and how we relate to our families and 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 artists socialist beliefs shining through. The exhibition aims to explore how Hannah 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.