Anne Marit Austbø

NAVIGATOR – NEW WORKS

22nd of January – 15th of February

OPENING THURSDAY JANUARY 22nd AT 6 PM. WELCOME!

Austbø is a visual artist with a distinctive visual language and a nuanced, coloristically rich expression.
The exhibition presents a series of paintings that explore human presence in relation to landscape, particularly in connection with the sea. Human figures in motion and stillness form a recurring motif throughout the works.

Austbø invites the viewer into a sunlit universe that signals brighter times ahead, but perhaps also notions of escape and the search for courage in a more uncertain existence.
The subject matter is drawn primarily from the artist’s immediate surroundings, but also includes motifs from the documentary film Women and the Wind, which depicts three women crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The paintings are based on photographs, yet they consciously move away from the photographic as an expressive mode. Instead, emphasis is placed on the sensory and material qualities of painting through the use of color, brushwork, and composition.

At the same time, like photographs, the paintings also bear traces of being images of something that has been—like pictures from an album of moments revisited, moments one wishes to remember and linger on: an embrace, water splashing down a back, the wind brushing against the skin.

Austbø’s first solo exhibition at Galleri A in 2023 marked her debut as an artist and sold out. This exhibition is her second solo exhibition at the gallery and represents a continuation and deepening of her artistic practice.

About the artist
Anne Marit Austbø (b. 1974) is a visual artist based and working in Norway. She began her artistic practice after several years of working in human rights organizations, including the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the Norwegian Refugee Council, with a particular focus on the human rights situation in Russia.

Austbø has held solo exhibitions at Galleri A and Ingeborg Refling Hagen’s Cultural Center Fredheim, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. From 2016 to 2018, she co-led the activist art project Drawing for Freedom together with visual artist and then professor at the National Academy of Fine Art, Jeannette Christensen. The project was exhibited at venues including the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, and Akershus Art Center in Lillestrøm.

Her works have been acquired by the OsloMet Art Collection and Kristiania University College.