Elsa Thoresen
Paintings 1945 – 1992
17.01 – 15.02.2025
Belenius
Opening
Thursday, 16.01 at 5 – 7 PM
The burning-mirror of imagination
Elsa Thoresen’s late paintings
Art is not a private nightmare, not even a private dream,
it is a shared human connection that traces the
possibilities of past and future in the whorl of now.
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Art takes time. Not just to create but also to experience. Crammed together in a gallery space, Elsa Thoresen’s paintings demand that we ignore everything around them. “When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake?” the writer Jeanette Winterson asks in her essays on art. According to Winterson, art is inherently subversive, regardless of whether it upholds or challenges prevailing norms. It expands our vision. Elsa Thoresen’s paintings do the same.
In many respects, her visual language is distinctive and well-defined, even though the style may vary. But her works do not readily lend themselves to being classified or tied to a specific period. What unites them is the artist’s ability to capture something that lurks under the surface. Something that is sensed rather than seen. That the universe vibrates? That all life has its own frequency?
Elsa Thoresen’s life map spans several countries and two continents. She was born on 1 May 1906 in Minnesota, USA, and died on 20 August 1994 in Seattle. As an artist, however, her identity was rooted in Europe, where she lived for many years, and where her practice was originally formed. She grew up in the USA but studied at art colleges in Oslo and Brussels. Together with her husband, the Danish artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Elsa Thoresen became a part of the avant-garde movement that pursued surrealism fervently in the 1930s, not just as an art style but as an approach to life. Her circle included Wilhelm Freddie, Harry Carlsson, Franciska Clausen and Rita Kernn-Larsen.
Elsa Thoresen and Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen lived in Denmark until 1944, when the atrocities of the Second World War forced them to flee to Sweden with their two children. In Sweden, Thoresen affiliated herself with the Halmstad Group and exhibited in Stockholm, Karlstad, Örebro and Karlskoga.
Joanna Persman
Krakow, December 2024
(excerpt from the exhibiton text).