The Vigeland Museum is proud to present artist Dag Erik Elgin and his art in the Vigeland Museum. The Museum is dedicated to Norway’s most famous sculptor, Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), mostly known for the monumental Vigeland Park.

Dag Erik Elgin's exhibition ‘A modernistic Endpoint’ has Vigeland's urn as a turning point. In the tower room of the Vigeland Museum stands the original bronze urn, containing Vigeland's ashes, made after Vigeland’s own design. On the walls in the circular room; 18 reliefs, 10 of them unfinished – standing as unfinished art by Gustav Vigeland – interrupted by his death on March 12, 1943.

Elgin has repeated Vigeland’s urn – cast in plaster, together with what he sees as ten white monochromes (plaster), placed in Room VII of the Vigeland Museum. In this exhibition, Elgin explores Vigeland's unfinished art, side by side with his own works.

- Last year The Vigeland Museum celebrated Gustav Vigeland’s 150^th Year Anniversary. Now, Dag Erik Elgin has opened our minds to what we can call Vigeland's incomplete works. Vigeland's death became an endpoint for his work, but with Elgin’s sharp perspectives, it emerges as a kind of beginning in another and established artistry, said Jarle Strømodden, Museum Director at the Vigeland Museum.

With Elgin's exhibition, the unfinished, empty and white squares take on a new role and Vigeland's unfinished art becomes autonomous artwork. The squares are no longer unfinished and worthless, but in a double sense valuable.

Worked in Vigeland’s studio

Dag Erik Elgin was invited to use Vigeland’s atelier (now the Vigeland Museum) as his own, and during this period, Elgin sculptured the work Gustav V. Topoi I-II (2019-2020). The two horizontal squares, cast in dark and light plaster, and modelled after the base (plinths) that forms the ground for Vigeland's Three Groups in the preserved Fountain Hall at the Vigeland Museum.

Modernist?
Gustav Vigeland is considered a figurative and classical artist. His depictions of the individual and the heroic expression of the family are far from the reductive expression of modernism. Despite Vigeland's pronounced criticism of modernism, Elgin finds a distinct tension between figure and geometric form in Vigeland’s art. Elgin compiles his own art with works by Vigeland from the Vigeland Museum's collection. Among other things, he exhibits the deep icon Originals / Grisaille (Malevich), two repetitions based on the black square of the avant-garde and theorist Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935). According to Malevich, this is not about pictorial purification or absence of the figure, but about total incorporation of content.

About Dag Erik Elgin (f. 1962)

Elgin has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at museums and institutions including: Albertinum, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden. In 2014 he won the Carnegie Art Award first prize for his monumental work ‘Balance of Painters’.

Elgin was a professor at the Academy of Fine Art - Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2010-2016) and has contributed to numerous publications and exhibition projects addressing the position of painting within contemporary art.

Recent presentations of Elgin’s work include the exhibition ‘In Order of Appearance’ (28.02.2020-28.03.2020) at OSL Contemporary, Oslo. Elgin also has an upcoming solo exhibition at Vartai Gallery, Vilnius (2020).