In 1980, Marianne Heske (b. 1946) took with her a stack of wood from Tafjord on Sunnmøre to the Center Pompidou in Paris. The Norwegian artist’s installations are her trademark.
Marianne Heske (b. 1946) is an artist with great international impact and appeal. Heske has a degree from Bergen School of Arts and Crafts, Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Royal College of Art in London and Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
She grew up partly in Ålesund and partly in Tafjord; her father was director of the energy company Tafjord Kraft.
Her debut exhibition was at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1973, and since then she has had a number of exhibitions at renowned galleries both in Norway and abroad. She has been purchased by all the country’s largest museums and galleries, as well as several of international ones, such as the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Shanghai City Art Collection in China, and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, as the first Norwegian artist since Edvard Munch.
Heske is particularly known for her video manipulated landscapes, installations and various casts of an antiquarian doll’s head she found at a market in Paris in 1971. In Torshovdalen in Oslo is a 10-ton heavy bronze sculpture of this doll’s head. This little doll’s head has followed her throughout her career and she has made it in countless variants and materials, and in collaborating across cultures and borders.
She has collaborated with artists in countries such as Nepal, China, Zimbabwe and South Africa, yet it was her upbringing in the small and almost isolated village of Tafjord on Sunnmøre that has left the deepest traces in her art.
Among her works is Istårn (Ice Tower) from 1992, for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. She is represented in various galleries, including the National Museum in Oslo, Henie-Onstad Art Centre, Bonnefanten Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul.
In 2016, she placed an old shack in front of the Parliament building in Oslo titled “House of Commons”.
Last year, she exhibited her much talked about artwork “Wittgenstein’s Boat” during the Bergen Festival.
Installations by a Norwegian Artist, written by Tor Kjolberg
Feature image (on top): Carousel Man © Fine Art