Kurt Johannessen

Norway
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
VIVO Media Arts Centre, 7:30 PM
Presented in collaboration with Open Space, Victoria and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria with the generous support of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway.

Biography

Kurt Johannessen works with performance and installation art. Today he is one of Scandinavia’s major performance artists and is prominent on the international scene. Since the beginning of the 1980s he has produced approximately 160 different works and has had more than 300 presentations all over the world. His work is characterized by a minimalist and poetic presence.

Kurt Johannessen has also worked within performance artist’s books video and installations since the early eighties. His work is minimalist and poetic, and at times with a touch of humour. He is his own publisher and has produced more than 60 books, many of them translated into English. The books vary from just one sentence to short stories or just pictures.

Norwegian critic Audun Eckhoff writes:
“Kurt Johannessen’s art appears quiet-mannered, poetic, experimental. His actions and productions do not seem heavily loaded with significance, and can scarcely be said to hold the sort of specific meanings many of the well-known performances from the 1960s and ’70s held. Nevertheless, his artistic practice — begun in the 1980s in an artistic outpost, with few parallels and precursors — is clearly anchored in the short tradition of performance art.”

Video