Guided group tour The Shape of Freedom
Image: Lee Krasner, Through Blue, 1963. Oil on canvas, 191.8 x 147.3 cm. Private collection. Photo © Lee Krasner
Meeting place: Lobby, at least 10 minutes before
Language: Norwegian / English
Duration: 45 min, calculate 1 hour including transfer. After completing the tour, you can move around freely in all exhibitions.
Group size: Up to 10, 15 or 20 persons. Groups of more than 20 must be booked into two different time slots.
Group tours must be booked at least 14 days in advance.
Tour prices:
Up to10 people – NOK 3500
Up to15 people – NOK 4250
Up to 20 people – NOK 5000
Prices include entrance to all exhibitions.
Members get 10 % off.
The Shape of Freedom
Exhibition, 3rd floor
In the exhibition The Shape of Freedom visitors will have the chance to see some of the best known artists and works in the field of abstract expressionism and its European counterpart, art informel. Viewers can see artworks by Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Georges Mathieu, Judit Reigl, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne and Clyfford Still, among others. In a variety of different ways, these paintings display a unique sense of the moment, which the exhibition seeks to help the public to experience.
The exhibition will draw connecting lines between a Europe in the aftermath of war, and America’s burgeoning, influential art scene in the same period. On both sides of the ocean, society was reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the coming of the atom bomb. The exhibition shows how artists searched for new ways to deal with these shattering events. The public can discover artistic approaches that ploughed completely new furrows at the time. Radical techniques include action painting with drips and rhythmic swirls. The use of fingers, sticks and horizontal canvases. Soaking, burning or tilting the painting – or covering it with massive fields of colour.
