Over the past year, Natasja Askelund has worked with a series of paintings that meet the audience’s gaze. Big eyes stare out of the canvases, empty, mournful and faceless. The last year is largely what we have encountered when we have moved among strangers; faceless eyes. And hands. Hands that are pulled out to be sprayed, or hands that try to avoid touching anything unnecessary. The warm hands of the health worker who cares for the sick.
In addition to being an artist, Natasja Askelund is also a health worker. A job she probably initially took most to manage financially, but which over the years she has begun to feel proud of, and which she during the pandemic, along with the rest of the population, fully realized the importance of. And it seems as if Askelund thinks it is in this connection that the hands have become a motif in her paintings, the helping, comforting hands, at the same time it is also the hands that are the painter Askelund’s most important tool. Next to the eyes, the hands, a sick girl who also reappears in some of the paintings, we find a gaping dog. It seems aggressive, with a force, but it is uncertain whether this force is protective or threatening.
It is not so easy to decipher Askelund’s latest series of works, but that is probably not the intention either. It is the unspoken, what one can not so easily put into words, Askelund searches for in her artistic practice, she gropes for a content that can not be so easily expressed in words. She seeks to visualize what is inside and what is outside, at the same time.
Natasja Askelund (b. 1969) lives in Stavanger and is educated at Vestlandets Kunstakademi, Bergen and Koninklijke Academie Van Beeldende Kunsten, The Hague. Askelund had his debut exhibition at Hå gamle prestegard in 1992 and has since had a number of solo exhibitions at central galleries throughout the country such as Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Galleri Gann, Sandnes, Nord Trøndelag Fylkesgalleri and Haugesund Billedgalleri. She has also participated in several group exhibitions at places such as Haugar Art Museum, Drammen Museum, Aberdeen Art Gallery, the West Norway Exhibition, Stavanger Art Museum, the Autumn Exhibition, and LNM. She has been purchased for a number of public collections, including the National Museum, Stavanger Art Museum, Statoil, Rogaland County Municipality, Stavanger Municipality.
