A pair of sculpted lions wrap their front paws around the bases of the two flagpoles in front of the entrance of Kunstnernes Hus, an artist-run gem of an institution. For Gunvor Nervold Antonsen’s solo exhibition “De fleksible” (The Adaptables), these frisky felines were joined by a large wooden sculpture portraying one grown-up and two children, made by the artist together with Erik Pettersen. The piece had turned out to be too heavy to move into the upstairs gallery spaces. Yet that weight—a weight that could everywhere be felt in this exhibition—was not only material, it was social and discursive.
Nervold Antonsen has, over her twenty-year career, challenged the conventions of textile art, first with text, by incorporating words into her textiles, and later by publishing books of her own poetry to accompany her works. In this exhibition, she shared text via sound recordings of her reading. In recent years, moreover, she has paired her textiles with wooden sculptures, mostly carved by chain saw. The wooden forms were initially smaller, as in the 2015–16 exhibition “Hybridenes poesi” (The Poetry of Hybrids) at the Textilmuseet in Borås, Sweden, but now they can weigh hundreds of pounds.
The works in “De fleksible” are rooted in Nervold Antonsen’s home in Rollag, Numedal, the southernmost of the major valleys in eastern Norway. From Conversations With (all works 2022–23)—installed in an old boardroom tucked away between two magnificent skylighted exhibition halls—is a forty-minute-long sound recording. Listening on headsets, we hear Nervold Antonsen reading stories she heard while interviewing inhabitants of the region, including accounts of alcohol abuse, rape, incest, the legacy of poverty, and the shock of a society transitioning from an agricultural basis to a condition of neoliberal precarity. There are heart-wrenching stories of resignation, of accepting fate and making the most of the cards dealt. While listening to the piece, one could contemplate These Dreams Do Not Exist in You, three smaller reliefs in linden and poplar, each depicting a fetus or small child on a backdrop of yellow petals.
Many of the works in the gallery spaces nodded to art-historical precursors such as Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, and Vincent van Gogh, but with a twist. In one of the textile collages in the Iconostasis group, sleeping faces peek out from among the green petals of water lilies emerging from the background. The textile collages are just as monumental as the wooden sculptures, and the tight hang here makes the exhibition feel a bit too crowded. Some even spill out of their frames or onto the floor. The flowers depicted in the textile piece In the Morning the Shadows Rise form the meadowy background to fifty-five differently colored flower sculptures in ash, beech, birch, fir, maple, pine, and poplar, arranged in a half circle on the floor in front of it.
Both in the textile collages and in the wooden sculptures, Nervold Antonsen liberates the human figure from gender markers. This approach makes it easier to focus on other aspects of life and gives a nonbinary person like me a sense of relief. The group of eleven wooden sculptures that lent the exhibition its title emphasizes intergenerational relationships. These pieces tenderly depict grown-ups and children and evoke the need to protect the smaller ones. Yet the work is far from sentimental or nostalgic and, like the exhibition as a whole, deals respectfully with real lives lived.
