With Grass Under the Feet—Kajsa Zetterquist in Focus

With Grass Under the Feet—Kajsa Zetterquist in Focus presents a dozen works by the eighty-nine-year-old painter who has lived in the roadless land of Saltfjellet in northern Norway since 1967. The exhibition presents one work per decade since the 1950s when Zetterquist began her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, after which we can follow her expressive idiom in the informal school up to the sensitive drawings of the 2020s. In addition to her work as an artist, the exhibition focuses on her unique life in the mountains with her artist husband Per Adde (1924–2020).

Artist Ingela Johansson has created a video portrait of Zetterquist especially for the exhibition, highlighting various aspects of her work, including the struggle for the environment and for Sámi rights, as well as for creating an infrastructure for contemporary art in northern Norway. Her efforts in founding the art school in Kabelvåg, the Northern Norwegian Art Museum in Tromsø, and the Academy of Fine Arts there cannot be overstated. Two new texts, by artist and writer Ilmira Bolotyan and curator Olga Shirokostup, address Zetterquist and Adde’s friendship with Soviet painter Yuri Reshkin and how solidarity has characterized their lives and work. The texts are presented in a separate publication.

The possibilities of painting—color, line, volume, and the interplay between surface and depth—are all central to the discipline and medium, collectively underscoring the value of sensory experience. The gaze, its wandering between the different parts of the picture, is of central importance. After studying at the Konstfack School and the private Signe Barth School of Painting, she was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1957, where—under the influence of professors such as Ragnar Sandberg, Lennart Rodhe, Bror Hjort, and Bror Marklund—she developed an independent artistic practice with a distinct and personal expression. Since the late 1960s, her paintings have taken shape in her studio on Saltfjellet, surrounded by the magical light and suggestive darkness of the northern latitudes