As a child in Sørlandet, Øystein Aasan was taken to fortifications built by the Germans during the war as part of the Atlantic Wall. With a flashlight, they snuck into these pragmatic architectural constructions. Aasan remembers little of the details, but he remembers well the insane feeling of space of moving through dark narrow corridors, which suddenly opened into large halls inside the mountain, with narrow openings that let in streaks of light. Based on these memories, Aasan has made models, small wooden sculptures of some of these abandoned military bases. In addition to making models of bunkers that are filtered through his own memory, he also uses the memories of others, by searching for archive photographs of other similar military fortifications. He has so far made models of around 40 bunkers, geographically spread all over the world and belonging to different ideologies. Using isometric drawing, he then creates two-dimensional paintings, which he uses in the paintings. Logical structures and mathematical drawing are not new in Aasan’s artistic practice; The technical drawing he uses here is called ‘Military oblique projection’ and is a way of describing the object’s real proportions, which has been used to draw fortifications dating back to the 18th century. or the grid, he has used in his series of works. The technical drawing he uses here is called ‘Military oblique projection’ and is a way of describing the object’s real proportions, which has been used to draw fortifications dating back to the 18th century. or the grid, he has used in his series of works. The technical drawing he uses here is called ‘Military oblique projection’ and is a way of describing the object’s real proportions, which has been used to draw fortifications dating back to the 18th century.
The paintings themselves are colorful, beautiful, seemingly quite far removed from the brutal origins of the underlying theme. But these military bases are not just memorials to a brutal past. The context of the constructions has changed, they have lost their original function, and the basically purely functional constructions have in several cases become peace monuments, anti-war abstractions.
Aasan wants the audience to be able to meet his work with different attitudes and at different levels. He creates a visual entrance to the works, and you can choose to meet them as purely visual objects. But should one wish to dive further into Øystein Aasan’s thematic universe, the exhibition begins with presentations of the archive material and the sketches he has used in his preparatory research. In room two you will find felt-tip pen drawings and one of the models he has used, framed in a box that also has a function in the isometric drawing process. While in the last room the result of the explorations is shown; the paintings. The walls the finished works hang on, Aasan has chosen to give a dark gray color. In this way, he creates a visual narrative about memories, memory, logical constructions and military bunkers that run through LNM’s three halls.
Øystein Aasan (b. 1977), is a trained visual artist at the Oslo Academy of the Arts and lives in Berlin. Since 2004, he has made a number of exhibitions at home and abroad. Institutional exhibitions include; Kunsthalle Lingen; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo; Momentum Biennale, Moss; Migros Museum, Zurich; Kunstverein Arnsberg; Liverpool Biennale; Sørlandets Kunstmuseum and Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo. In addition to solo and group exhibitions at Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna; C24 Gallery, New York; RH Contemporary, New York; PSM, Berlin; LAUTOM, Oslo and Galerie Katharina Bittel, Hamburg. Aasan has published essays and reviews in a number of international magazines.
