Frans Widerberg: After Eden, Paintings and Prints, 1989-2008

Years ago Frans Widerberg’s archetypal male and female figures, marooned in a featureless void, evoked the shivering Adam and Eve in Masaccio’s “Expulsion”. The spindly legged horse and rider had as their sinister predecessor Goethe’s “Erl King”, although they also had echoes of Daumier’s “Don Quixote”. The light in which Widerberg’s unreal episodes occur suggested that of the Northern Lights (the Aurora Borealis) or of nuclear incandescence.

Later, he peopled his metaphysical dramas with a richly varied company of actors; centaurs, winged dogs, harpies, lions, unicorns and hermaphrodites. In Widerberg’s alternative universe natural laws do not apply. Gravity is suspended; figures swoop or fly or hover upside down. Sometimes they appear to be caught in one of those transmigration chambers familiar from science fiction; bodies seem to dematerialise in a corrosive light.

We’ve met his cast of characters before, in the Symbolism of Klinger, Redon and Munch, but the artist to whom he seems most closely connected is the English visionary William Blake. There are differences, of course, between Christian poet and secular humanist, between radical theist and intuitive cosmologist and, while Blake merely aspired to libertarianism, Widerberg expresses it. The similarities, though, include conflicts between “innocence and experience”, love and aggression and enigmatic musings about other spheres of reality. 

Exhibition catalogue
Frans Widerberg: After Eden, Foreword by Mara-Helen Wood, Introduction by William Varley, 16 full colour images, 20 pages. Priced at £5.00 plus p&p.
To order please email kpg@kingsplace.co.uk.

Touring to the University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, 11 September - 23 October 2009, http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery/

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Frans Widerberg film