Trude Viken: Behind the Facade

Written By Maren Kjærnes

Hilde Mørch
Kunsthistorisk Prosjektsenter
Juni 2022

Translation: Arlyne Moi, April 2023

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD WOMAN

You´ll love

my shiny

nose

my stretch marks

my blackheads

my writings

my ailments

my quirks

and my cats that go

with being a spinster

or else you won´t love me (1)

 

Thirty-Year-Old Woman is from the poetry collection Obra (Mariposa Azual, Lisbon 2000) by Adília Lopes, a Portuguese poet who writes about her world as she experiences it. Her poems include vivid memories, yet she does not try to make them aesthetically appealing or elevated. Such is also the case for the artist Trude Viken (b. 1969, Lødingen in Nordland, Norway), in her forceful, vulnerable portraits and figural compositions. The portraits – called Diary Notes – are direct, honest and revealing encounters with herself and her relation to the surrounding world; these are portraits most of us can recognise as being of ourselves. They appear more in the form of masks aiming to show what we hide underneath more-or-less successful facades. 

Who are we when we do not play-act? Who are we when we throw away the mask? And who are other people behind all their window dressing? Who can we trust to be themselves? Like the poem by Adíla Lopes,(2) Trude Viken’s art is an attempt to counteract chaos, to establish a certain amount of order and insight into who she is – as an artist and a person. It is a matter of finding her own artistic expression, her identity as an artist and creating connections and new contexts. Perhaps it is also an attempt to straighten up part of her own complexity, and, not least, the big and complex world. These are works that can be interpreted on both the micro and macro level.

The poet Adília Lopes is considered one of the most important postmodern Portuguese writers of the last few decades. She has collaborated with several Portuguese artists, including the internationally known Paula Rego (1935–2022), for the aforementioned publication Obra. Starting in the 1950s, Rego played a key role in redefining figurative art – internationally. An uncompromising artist, she in many ways revolutionised the way women are depicted. And it is precisely Rego who is one of Viken’s most important sources of inspiration. Viken discovered Rego while traveling in Portugal in 2011, and since then has repeatedly been drawn to the Portuguese artist’s works.

Prosess

Through working with portraits, Trude Viken has found her own unique expression and has carried it forward into the large figural compositions. She works intuitively, and the visual subjects arise of their own accord. In some pictures she has used thin layers of paint; others have layers in bold impasto. Rough traces of the brush are obvious, and the process itself sits in the pictures. In some of them, the thick layers create a texture reminiscent of some sort of terrain – a physical, tactile and vulnerable landscape as an added dimension to the subject matter. The faces appear as if kneaded over and over again in paint, with an incredibly rich range of emotions.

The colour combinations are untraditional and brave, and there is a rare intensity in the way Viken ‘digs’ out and shapes her images. They express freshness and are seldom overworked. A thick, gnarled and rough surface, however, does not always imply strong feelings and emotional involvement; it is no more charged with feelings than is a thinly painted surface, even though the Expressionists thought so. Viken manages convincingly to convey a raw truth – one which, with the thick layers of paint, almost becomes physical; it is something one has a need to touch, for the tactile truth seems to be sensed in the paint.

The Portraits – Diary Notes

Diary Notes started as an exploration of the self-portrait genre and an attempt to find her own expression, but it soon developed into something larger and more universally relevant. The portraits express a person’s many-faceted range of feelings – a darkness and honesty that appeal to viewers because they recognise themselves. Given that society, on many levels, idolises what is perfect, it becomes all the more important for art to contribute to society by expressing what it means to be human – in all its breadth and diversity. The series Diary Notes is like a huge family portrait, a family album for better and worse, which honestly exposes family conflicts, secrets and the fear of rejection. The portraits are made in small formats, but they have on several occasions been mounted together in monumental format – side-by-side as an installation – most recently at the art centre Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in 2021 – with a total of 259 self-portraits.

During Oslo Open in 2021, Viken presented herself as follows: ‘Portraits from the dull everyday are what most of all capture my interest. They’ve developed into fabulations about how we’re doing behind our facade. I want to express feelings, and they must be genuinely felt. When I have bad days, I know that most people around me have them too. These days, hours and minutes are part of life. We smile bravely and come across as problem-free to others in our environment, but it’s of course ourselves we fool. The fact of it being so difficult to reveal one’s vicissitudes makes me curious. It makes me want to continue.’(3)

Viken’s portraits are exaggerated, hefty, laughable, tragic and absurd – and can be seen as collective images of people today. They pinpoint something in us – nationally and internationally. That this happens in painting, an art form severely censured not long ago, is interesting.

The Figural Compositions

Viken has worked in recent years with larger figural compositions. The expression and mode of painting are the same, but the format and compositions are new. They present a hefty dynamic between human figures involved in diverse activities. The figures’ outlines and contours are clearer and more obvious than in the self-portraits – and the colours have become brighter and stronger. Girls with braids, open wounds on their neck, health workers, wounds sewn together with zipper-like stitches, women giving birth, women with bleeding genitals, amoeba-shaped figures – half human, half animal – move about in a kind of universe with sun, stars and planets. Animalistic bodies with their guts and skeleton exposed, animals biting humanoid figures, figures with both male and female attributes, figures giving birth but not knowing whether what they give birth to is human or animal, intimidatingly large hands entering from the side edge and threatening the idyll, a woman and man conversing or embracing, dream and reality, pain and joy. The cross as a symbol recurs, perhaps with a reference to her earlier career as a nurses’ aid, or perhaps as a critique of religion. 

Expressive Expression – Sources of Inspiration

Contemporary art reflects our own times, our society and life. At the same time, contemporary artists draw inspiration from art history. Expressivity and expressionistic visual language are hallmarks of Trude Viken’s art. To say that a work of art is ‘expressionistic’ usually means it is heftily and boldly painted and conveys the artist’s feelings through a subjective and skewed depiction of the external world.

Ever since her first visit to the Munch Museum and throughout her youth, Viken was fascinated by the expressionist Edvard Munch, Norway’s most internationally known painter. She was also to some extent interested in the art of Paul Gauguin. Both Munch and Gauguin explored and processed the life of emotions with brutal honesty, seeking to illustrate the feelings people have but often suppress. But Viken’s interest shifted after she saw the expressionistic portraits of Leon Kossoff, shown at Anneli Juda Fine Art in London in 2010. Kossoff was involved in the artist group called the School of London, which worked with a type of painting described as ‘existential figuration’, where the individual and that which is human take centre stage. The group was interested in oil painting’s materiality as an expression of human bodily existence.

The Norwegian art critic Lotte Sandberg characterizes Kossoff as an urban heimstadmaler, that is, an artist who paints the place where he lives. (4) He began drawing and painting his local environment while still a youth, and he continued to do so throughout his career. It was his only subject matter. And – by using it as his impetus, his pictures convey something general – about other places, yes, about all places, as do Viken’s portraits, which speak directly about something universally human – embedded deeply within us. Several School-of-London painters were showcased in Norway at Astrup Fearnley Museum in 1994, in an exhibition entitled Dobbel Virkelighet (Double Reality). Frank Auerback, another artist who participated in that exhibition, has also been important for Trude Viken’s artistic practice. His intensity and rough handling of subject matter, with thick paint layers, convey a kind of sensing – in the body and the paint. His ‘wild’ images are closely linked to art history and the painterly tradition, as is Viken’s art.

The Swede Lena Cronquist’s artistic universe seems also to be related to Viken’s circle of subjects. In oftentimes autobiographical images, she uses expressive brushwork to depict childhood, the mother’s role, illness, love and death. Her paintings and the psychological depth of her imagery have had profound significance for autobiographical painting in Nordic art.

Nevertheless, the artist who has had, and continues to have, the most importance for Viken is perhaps Paula Rego, whose works reflect a feminism inspired by folk themes from her homeland Portugal. Many of her works present women in disturbing situations, and they also have numerous art historical references. Rego is today considered by many to be the most important artist to paint the life of women in our times – honestly and directly. She was, incidentally, also actively involved in the School of London, as an exhibiting member, along with Frank Auerback and David Hockney.

No Idyll – No Dreams

Trude Viken is a realist in the sense that she consistently relates to the present and to reality – not to dreams or idealised states of being. Her portraits and figural compositions are not intended to be ‘beautiful’ in an external sense, but beautiful in their expression of raw vulnerability. What is beauty? Opinions vary; it depends on who you ask. What is most beautiful for many, however, is what is most profoundly human: encounters between people who expose their vulnerability. And it is precisely the human, dynamic and psychological poetry of everyday life that she describes in the paintings; the pulse of humanity and how life pulls us in different directions based on our emotions and needs. Viken’s colours, forms and brushwork, the very process of painting, become pictures of life itself. The pictures are in many respects about the creative force as part of what it means to be human – and the survival of that force.

Viken’s images trigger thoughts about the modern picture’s paradox – the multiplicity of reality. Her artistic practice refers in various ways to the perceptible reality outside the pictures, where we encounter faces and bodies and our own memories and experiences: an inescapable reality. She generously shares with us as viewers, and we recognise situations and emotions. As the art historian Hans-Jakob Brun writes in his text about seven painters from the School of London, the picture is ‘a testimony of an individual’s struggle with oil paint on canvas, with composition, abstraction, skewing and adjusting, combining and modelling. Here there is aesthetic provocation as well as seduction, a physical release of energy as well as painstaking execution, all consciously created by an individual in a studio situation in front of an easel, for our viewing’. (5) This can also be a fitting description of Viken’s art.

International Breakthrough

Viken both debuted and made a breakthrough internationally in May 2018. It happened suddenly – in New York. Her first ‘grid’ of Diary Notes was sold when she held the exhibition Faces and Traces at Fortnight Institute in the East Village. Timeout.com compared her with Francis Bacon and James Ensor. (6) The web-based magazine also recommended the exhibition as being among the five best on show that particular week. But the whole international breakthrough actually started before the exhibition, via Instagram, when the American artist Richard Prince, who is incidentally well-represented in the collection of Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, discovered and commented on Viken’s pictures and eventually contacted her because he was interested in buying some of them. The owners of Fortnight Institute, both of whom had previously been Prince’s assistants, invited her to hold an exhibition. The snowball began rolling.

Also in 2018, the prestigious independent art publisher Innen, which is based in Zurich and promotes Swiss and international contemporary art, published a zine on Trude Viken called Drawings. With this, her career truly picked up speed. 

In subsequent years she has held solo exhibitions both internationally and nationally: Unmasked at M+B in Los Angeles (2019), The Tendon Blanket Goes Down at Nightfall at Buer Gallery in Oslo (2021), Midnight Theater at Fortnight Institute in New York (2021) and Night Eyes at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium (2021). This latter exhibition was delayed one year due to the covid pandemic. In 2022 she held the solo exhibitions Midnight Activities at Belenius in Stockholm and Double Portraits at OTP in Copenhagen, as well as participating in several art fairs and other events.

National Breakthrough

It was initially easier for Viken to gain public attention in the USA than in Norway. But – with the solo exhibition Night Eyes at the art centre Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in 2021, her breakthrough in Norway was a fact. The art historian Øivind Storm Bjerke reviewed the exhibition for the newspaper Klassekampen. The review starts by pointing out that Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium lives up to its ambition of being ‘a place for experiments and new discoveries’. ‘Trude Viken paints portraits and figural pictures charged with caricature, vulgarity and rudeness. But – what is most captivating about these pictures is not the raw subject matter but the direct and playful mode of painting.’ He continues by saying that the paint ‘comes to life in the pictures through alteration between gnarled surfaces, where the brush leaves deep traces in the surface, and smoothly applied passages. Colours that scream and colours that contract and go silent cause the gaze’s wandering across the pictorial plane to take a dramatic journey in a unique universe.’ He concludes thus: ‘Viken’s exaggerated, laughable, festive and tragic figures give us a collective portrait of contemporary people. Part of what is most interesting about the pictures is that this happens in the form of paintings, with a digital medium as the means of communication to an international artworld’. As a finale, he mentions how interesting it is that painting – as an artistic medium – has shown not only that it can hold its ground, but that it can also develop in new directions, ‘as a consequence of challenges from newer pictorial technologies’. (7)

Aleksi Mannila, writing in the newspaper Morgenbladet, gives her an unambiguously positive review. He is impressed by the expressivity and visual abundance and ‘is tempted to say that Trude Viken is a sensation of a painter; she is in any case in possession of a rare and complex expression that wrings out a universally existing emotional life’. (8)

That same spring – in 2021 – Hannah Stamler wrote a review of Viken’s second solo show at Fortnight Institute, Midnight Theater, for Artforum, (9) one of the world’s most important periodicals for contemporary art. According to Stamler, ‘Viken adeptly commits to canvas the often-ineffable feelings of dysmorphia and disquiet that many of us struggle with’. Furthermore, that the identity drama captured in her ‘Diary Notes’ is ‘dialed up to surreal heights in Midnight Theater 1 and 2, both 2021, showing dream sequences that present the artist locked in a tumultuous battle between her inner angel and her inner demon’. Stamler describes the works as ‘unapologetic maximalism – layered brushwork, saturated color, and carnivalesque staging’, that they conjured something disquieting. She compares Viken’s works with those of Francis Bacon and Florine Stettheimer. The reviewer concludes by saying that Midnight Theater ‘gave us merely a small taste of the strange delights she has to offer’.

In the autumn of 2021, even more people became acquainted with Viken’s art due to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp’s televised programme Kunstnerliv. Trude Viken og Edvard Munch (Artist Life: Trude Viken and Edvard Munch). Here the emphasis was on Munch’s significance for Viken’s artistic practice. Both artists paint the raw emotions most of us are filled with but which we often hide from ourselves and others.

Education and Professionalisation

Trude Viken received her art training at the interdisciplinary art school DTK – Det Tverrfaglige Kunstinstitutt in Bærum (2009–2012). She worked for several years as a nurses’ aid, painting and creating art on the side. She then decided to focus fully on art. At 43 years of age, she applied to Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her application was refused and she was told in no uncertain terms that her English was not good enough and that she was already an ‘educated artist’.

After this experience, she was tutored for a while by Markus Brendmoe, who drew her attention to Polish-Norwegian Ryszard Warsinski (1937–1996), an artist who was Brendmoe’s teacher in the 1980s. Viken’s relation to Warsinski’s art came clearly to the fore in the exhibition Dialogues with the Past: Trude Viken and Ryszard Warsinski, shown at Bærum Kunsthall in 2020. Drawings and paintings by both artists were hung side-by-side, like a dialogue. In connection with the exhibition, Viken commented on her experience of Warsinski’s works: ‘In his pictures I recognise demonstrative expression and genuine feelings. These are some of the things I want to convey in my own works. I want to break away from the conventionally beautiful and to express things many perceive as ugly and too simple. What is repellent also has its beauty, and it can be beautiful for me.’ (10)

‘I search for a gruesome beauty’, Ryszard Warsinski said in 1975; a search that may also be a driving force in Viken’s works. In an interview in the newspaper Dagbladet, Warsinski tries to explain what he means: ‘I’m fascinated by an original beauty – a wild and gruesome beauty of our beginning and our end. We know there are both bad and good people. I’m interested in human nature such as it is – both the bad and the good. That is life – the bad and the good unified. This is how the picture emerges. And the gruesome beauty.’ (11) He ends the interview by saying that ‘an artist doesn’t get help from angels. Good wishes, the well-meant, can never result in good art, that’s for sure’.

The Way Forward

The years since Viken’s breakthrough in 2018 have been hectic. In addition to holding several large solo shows, she has participated in a number of group exhibitions and collective exhibitions internationally, among others, at 303 Gallery in New York (2021), Fortnight Institute in New York (2021), Everyday Gallery in Antwerp (2021) and Over Manhattan (2022) in New York. In Norway, she was represented in the spring of 2022 with five works in the new National Museum’s opening exhibition Jeg kaller det kunst (I Call It Art). (12) What is more, Anders Graham at Graham Film AS is in the process of making a documentary film: Trude Viken – det er aldri for sent å følge drømmen (Trude Viken – It’s Never Too Late to Follow the Dream). This is an artist’s career that accelerated suddenly, and it is important for her to find her own tempo and speed as she proceeds.

Trude Viken’s works remind us that painting can still connect us to each other – and the world – they are more than a means or an occasion for discussing stylistic issues. Her art is linked to art history and the painting tradition at the same time as she gives new form to this tradition. Using as her starting point Expressionism’s desperate expression and pastose brushwork, the pictures are an explosion of force and energy – that brings out honesty instead of all the pretence we surround ourselves with – in life and in art. Reality consists of many realities – double and multiplied realities. Viken’s art expresses this and helps renew figural painting and the portrait through a very independent contribution.

LITERATURE

Trude Viken: Night Eyes, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium (Ansten Press 2021) med tekster av:

  • Audrey Vollen: «Trude Viken». 

  • Fabiola Alondra og Jane Harmon, Fortnight Institute:  «Trude Viken: Night Eyes». 

Trude Viken. Drawings, Zine, Innen Books, Zurich, Switzerland 2018.

NEWSPAPERS/INTERNET MAGAZINES

2021

  • Lars Elton: Denne dama står for tidenes norske kunstsalg. I: Dagsavisen, 28. august 2021.

  • Øivind Storm Bjerke: Leker og reflekterer. I: Klassekampen, 10. juni 2021

  • Aleksi Mannila: «Over motene, bortenfor trenden». I: Morgenbladet, 4.-10.  juni 2021.

2020

2018

KILDER

  1. Thirty-year-old Woman, dikt fra diktsamlingen Obra (Mariposa Azual , Lisboa 2000) av Adília Lopes. Oversatt av Richard Zenith 2005.

  2. Pseudonym til Maria José da Silva Viana Fidalgo de Oliveira (f. 1960, Lisboa).

  3. https://osloopen.no/nb/kunstnere/3885  (22. desember 2021).

  4. Lotte Sandberg: Leon Kossoff. I: Dobbel virkelighet/Double Rality. «The School of London. Utstillingskatalog, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo 1994, s. 44.

  5. Hans-Jakob Brun: Dobbel virkelighet. Syv malere – The Shool of London. I: Dobbel virkelighet/Double Rality. «The School of London. Utstillingskatalog, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo 1994, s. 4.

  6. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/trude-viken-faces-and-traces (14. mai 2022)

  7. Klassekampen, 10. juni 2021. «Leker og reflekterer», signert Øivinds Storm Bjerke.

  8. Morgenbladet, 4.-10. juni 2021. «Over moten, bortenfor trenden», signert Aleksi Manila.

  9. https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202108/trude-viken-86780 (14. mai 2022)

  10. https://baerumkunsthall.no/DIALOGUES-WITH-THE-PAST-Viken-og-Warsinski (14 Mai 2022)

  11. Hilde Mørch: Ryszard Warsinski. Confabulari. Bildets vesen og den grusomme skjønnhet. Orfeus Publishing 2015, s. 110 (Dagbladet, 4. oktober 1975, signert Bernhard Rostad).

Maren Kjærnes
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Trude Viken: ARTIST’S STATEMENT 2018