In Breathe in into the Blue, Hanne Grete Einarsen takes the visitor on a captivating and overwhelming journey where personal experiences of illness, plague, adversity, physical and existential crisis are merged with a period of intense artistic creativity and strong creativity. Hanne Grete Einarsen’s content-rich exhibition on SDG is richly faceted, colorful, vital, painful and vibrant. This is art that tells, murmur, resist. And that breathes.
Exhibition Breathe in into the Blue, Hanne Grete Einarsen’s comprehensive solo exhibition at Sámi Dáiddaguovddáš/ The Sami Center of Contemporary art with almost a hundred works, it hurts and it feels good. These are artifacts that protest, shout, murmur, cry, swear, hurts. That tells stories, stands out, portrays and exhibit. And it breathes. Based on a critical period in the artist’s life, then – according to the artist – “a cancer diagnosis and a spinal cord injury caused me to rethink my entire existence,” the exhibition contains more extensive works and installations with distinct but interlinked themes. Often are many different techniques or media been used in the one artwork/ installation. The self-portrait series is basically a body silhouette outlined on a solid paper format, with symbols, images, patterns and texts that have been applied with the help of painting, drawing, print and stencil.
In Søljer, recycled cable drums are transformed of wood into playful metaphorical silver brooch in large format with the help of painted tin barrels from the 70th’s. Things that are found or acquired are given new meanings and associations. Here is also Hanne Grete Einarsen’s house incorporated in her art. Her house have been for a while used in previous projects and exhibitions. Often they are in a miniature format, like bird craters, and often in some way incomplete or unfinished. They may be a bit skew, miss an important feature, maybe a little lost, yet welcoming houses. They are handcrafted in wood and painted and in some way, they produce a different life story.
Breathe in into the Blue contains a lot of new work, and is the most comprehensive presentation of Hanne Grete Einarsen’s art. A wonderful and splendid cavalcade of works that both follow and expand the artist’s thematic and aesthetic repertoire. The house and the home is a hub. Surrounded by nature, the birds, and the reindeer are included or allies. At the same time we meet the story og her body, the blood circulation, heart, organs, nerve threads. And the pain – the concrete physical pain and the pain of life – and the joy. In the Loom installation, the grandmother’s old loom recovers. And the threads from the warp run like nerve threads on the front of the floor, where they meet, or get help from, a clean horn. In Einarsen artwork, emotions take shape and body, experiences become material and physical traces.
The title of the exhibition also refers to the nurse’s call during the radiation treatment, as the patient must hold his/ her breath to protect the body organs from the x- rays. The x- rays which can’t see the difference between good and bad cells. That is the art, the art of resistance and acceptance of life.
Hanne Grete Einarsen, born 1966, grew up on Skjevøy in Northern Norway. In 2005 she moved to Snefjord, Finnmark, where she now lives and works. She has a degree from the Kunstskolen in Kabelvåg, the West Iceland Academy of Art, and from Bergen University College.
