It is with great honor that Galleri Brandstrup presents a memorial exhibition by and for Inger Sitter (1929 – 2015), praising one of Norway’s leading artist along with a 15 year long partnership. Sitter passed away at 85 years old, and held her last and 85th exhibition at Galleri Brandstrup last year. This final solo exhibition will salute Sitter by showing a wide range of the mediums she mastered, such as painting, drawing and marble.
Sitter was born in Trondheim but moved frequently with her Finnish mother and Norwegian father. She grew up in Antwerp and later studied there. Her art debut was at Trondheim Art center in 1942 and only two years later, she was accepted to the academy of Arts in Oslo as the youngest student ever to attend. Her career began as a figurative painter but she quickly became one of the great modernists in Norway’s post-war art movement. Ever since, she has been one of the great rocks in modern Norwegian art until her death in 2015.
Through her involvement in artist politics, she has set great mark on the field of Norwegian art history, and has had a significant impact on Norwegian art history and the younger generation of artists proceeding her. Sitter was especially important in paving way for the nonfigurative painting in a profoundly conservative, national romantic postwar Norway. The strong opposition to the wave of abstraction created a separation in the art scene where a group of nonfigurative artists. Sitter and a group of artists created the exhibition assembly “The Dice”, with Tore Haaland, Carl Nesjar and Odd Tandberg among others.
Her art is renowned as lyrical abstraction, a style recognized by loose brushstrokes and an intuitive working process. Nature’s organic forms were also an inspiration for the style, which also is of great importance to Sitter’s art. She was especially enthused by the Norwegian seaside, particularly naked rocks by the shore in her home at Tjøme. Her art is characterized as vital, strong and poetic, a landscape many says reflects her spirit as much as the nature she paints.
Her compositions are so complex that it is difficult to recognize its abstract form, so it is recognized as purely nonfigurative. However, Sitter has also worked with applying her finished paintings into stone reliefs, which creates a united assembly between subject, material and self.
Opens September 3, at 7 PM