Essay by Joe Lam

The first time I encountered Lillian Presthus’s work — albeit from a distance — I was struck by a feeling I didn’t quite expect. The paintings didn’t rush forward, or explain themselves. They simply held their ground. Instead, I found myself slowing down. Listening. It was as if colour itself had taken a breath.

Text: Søren Rosberg

The use of a flat surface, possibly a canvas, along with line, form, and color, are among the few tools available to the visual artist to create a work. The artist's abilities, such as talent, intuition, knowledge, and experience, are added. Great art can be realized with no further prerequisites, provided these elements are brought into play until the desired constellation is achieved. In other words, almost no specific rules or procedures ensure a work's path to the legitimacy characteristic of the concept of "art."

Text by Gunnar Danbolt
The great German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin claimed that art arises from art. This was a radical assertion one hundred years ago, because according to Romanticism and modernism art should come from within the artist, uninfluenced by exterior factors. Art was expression, not imitation; the expression of a unique personality and therefore original.

Ingrid W. Berven | Lillian Presthus
Curated by Bjørn Inge Follevaag

They are also keys to understanding their works on a human, political, social and emotional level. From my point of view as curator intuition, the lived body, empathy and morals may in a meta-perspective be used to describe universal the universal aspects of Berven/Presthus’ oevre.

REVIEWED BY ØYSTEIN HAUGE

When one of the world’s leading art museums planned a retrospective exhibition of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944, known for his highly simplified compositions of red, yellow, and blue squares), the art experts chose to completely ignore the painter’s naturalistic flower paintings from the period before he became intellectually inaccessible. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York, only one question remained for painting to answer in 1995: What is a painting?

By Liv Falck

Lillian Presthus’s art involves us – not because she debates contemporary issues, but because she focuses on eternal human themes.