Press release -
Vanessa Baird – Go Down with Me
Vanessa Baird (b. 1963) has established herself as a key figure in Norwegian art with her uncompromising and expressive style, gaining significant international recognition. Her art – in which the personal is always political – makes her a beloved rebel for a wide audience. Now, she takes over the 3rd floor of MUNCH from 11 October, in the museum’s largest ever presentation of a living Norwegian artist.
The exhibition includes nearly 600 works spanning Baird's entire career: from her early oil paintings in the 1990s to watercolours, pastels, ceramics, staged photography, film, and an entirely new pastel and watercolour series.
In particular, the Mediterranean refugee crisis of 2014/15, and the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, are powerfully reflected in her new works – including some created as recently as the summer of 2024.
– Vanessa Baird's political and thought-provoking art challenges us to confront societal issues head-on. We are proud to present an artist who so powerfully creates images of what often remains unsaid, says Tone Hansen, director at MUNCH. – Her unique ability to illuminate complex and often uncomfortable realities makes this exhibition an experience that both moves and provokes," Hansen adds.
Since the winter of 2022, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have caused overwhelming human suffering. This is the basis of a brand-new room installation, You Must Never Go Down to the End of Town if You Don’t Go Down with Me, created especially for MUNCH.
A disturbing series of fifty-one pastel wall panels depicts dead children, severed heads and body parts, and the featureless rubble and wreckage of hospitals and bomb sites. One of the panels also includes a poem by the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim. For the first time, one of MUNCH’s public walkways outside the exhibition gallery will also be used to hang a work of art. Vanessa Baird’s controversial mural To Everything there is a Season, originally made for the Norwegian government quarter in 2012, will be integrated into the wall next to the exhibition entrance. In 2014, the work was installed in the Norwegian Arts Council’s foyer, where it stood for 10 years. The mural is considered one of the most significant works of contemporary Norwegian art and will return to the new government quarter in 2025.
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About the exhibition
Vanessa Baird (b. 1963) has been one of Norway’s most prominent visual artists since the 1990s. From the 2000s, Baird often created her art on her kitchen table, and within the walls of her home – amid the chaos of everyday life with children and an aging mother, but always with a sidelong glance at the world outside. She reflects on the repetitive nature of our lives, but also on how significant events can completely change our daily routines from one day to the next.
The exhibition avoids a conventional curatorial approach. Its architecture (by Manthey Kula) underlines the experience of Vanessa Baird’s intense presence and ongoing productivity. It does not present a chronological overview of Baird's artistic development from the 1990s to today, but instead shows the evolution, variations, and repetitions of her motifs. Initially, the artist depicted herself as a young, thoughtful, and ambitious figure on huge canvases, and later as an exhausted new mother, overwhelmed by the different phases of female life.
The exhibition is on the third floor of the museum from 11 October 2024 to 31 December 2024. The curator is Kari J. Brandtzæg, art historian and senior curator at MUNCH, who has been closely engaged with Vanessa Baird’s artistic practice for over 25 years. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring several articles that explore different aspects of Baird’s art and documents the works in the exhibition. As well as Brandtzæg, the contributors are theatre scholar Jon Refsdal Moe, senior curator Trude Schjelderup Iversen (KORO), and theatre director Vegard Vinge.
