Irene Nordli
The Pillars
11 August - 18 September 2022
Irene Nordli started by creating the series The Pillars for the project Afterglow, a new Nordic porcelain forum, where she, together with a group of artists from the various Nordic countries, was to investigate what was left of the porcelain industry in the Nordic countries. Several works in this series are now on display at the Clay Museum in Denmark and at the Gustavsberg Porselinsmuseum in Sweden. With Mingshu Li as her assistant, she continued to create more sculptures in this series. These are now being exhibited for the first time at Format.
Irene Nordli went to the porcelain city of Jingdezhen in China for the first time in 2011. There she found copies of Greek sculptures in the art supplies shop. She continued to work on these sculptures while she was there, taking casts of the copies and making new processed versions.
The molds she has used for the Pillars are from the world of hobby ceramics and can be used by anyone and have no high artistic value. Works that she has made based on these forms are like three-dimensional collages. The columns are deformed and crooked, and no longer in balance. The columns no longer support as they should and the forms they support are wobbly at the top. The figures are processed and put together, and become more or less unrecognizable.
There has been a tradition of transferring small models of classical marble sculptures to porcelain as decoration for the home. The porcelain imitates marble and both materials have the whiteness and light in them. Now we know that the Greek sculptures were once richly decorated and the colors covered the marble. Irene Nordli allows her glazes to do the same by covering the white porcelain.
Approaching classical sculpture continues to interest her. Moving between figuration and abstraction, the known and the unknown, the beautiful and the grotesque characterizes her art.
Irene Nordli (born 1967, Oslo) lives and works in Oslo and Heestrand in Sweden. She is educated at the National Collage of Art and Design, in Bergen (1995) and has been a professor at the Oslo Academi of the Arts, Department of Arts and Crafts until 2019. Nordli has had a number of solo exhibitions Works at institutions such as Kunstnerforbundet (2019), Ram Galleri (2018), Galleri Format (2016), Lillehammer Art Museum (2010) and Akershus Art Center (2005). Nordli has also participated in a number of group exhibitions at in Norway and abroad. In addition, Nordli has done many different Art in Public Space projects, such as Don't be a Stranger, Asker Kulturhus and Månelyst, Halden Prison (KORO). Her works have been purchased by Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Nasjonalmuseum for art, architecture and design, Oslo and KODE, Art Museums in Bergen, Lillehammer Art Museum, Drammen Museum, Punkt Ø, KORO, Eskilstuna Art Museum, Katrineholm Kulturhus, Sweden , Hamburg museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Germany.