EXHIBITION
JORUNN HANCKE ØGSTAD

VALENCIA

“Stupid as a painter” is a famous French proverb. It was a favorite of Marcel Duchamp, for whom it expressed the dead end that a mimetic artistic practice represented, an art that pleased the eye, not the intellect. But one could read it also to indicate less the literal stupidity of the painter, but the very reason he or she picks up a brush and paints. The tool in question is not used to articulate in words, but to create a visual language, to examine and structure the world. That is why painting is a rather heavy discipline, weighed down by it‘s own history. Jorunn Hancke Øgstad takes on this quality of painting in her own way, reinterpreting its history as an empowering back catalogue of painterly possibilities, while at the same time maintaining independence: “Being a painter today, means trying to forget.”