HELENE KNOOP
”DÉJÀ-VU”
Jan 18th - Feb 18th

View a webgallery of the exhibition

ABOUT HELENE KNOOP:
Helene Knoop lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Her oil paintings are authentic representations of humans with a sensual touch where the light comes from the inside.

Knoop handcrafts every painting, creating high quality paintings using a long process often up to a year until completion. Her paintings are within a classical manner with influences from the Renaissance and Symbolism .

She uses materials like the Old Masters did; oil painting on canvas, and she paints from life.

Knoop has studied under Odd Nerdrum, and became part of the renowned “Nerdrum School” where philosophical ideas are as equally important as the handcraft. She is a painter who values sincerity and handcraft above irony and originality. And her paintings are for everyone and for eternity.

A six-pages article showing her work and interview was published in the flight magazine, Scanorama in 2004.
Good sales results and publicity have been achieved at her solo-exhibitions. Her last solo show was in 2005, at Amells Gallery in London.

View images of her work at www.heleneknoop.com

A PAINTER OPPOSING CONTEMPORARY ART Written by; Prof. Dr. Jan-Erik Ebbestad Hansen at the University of Oslo

In Helene Knoop’s pictorial universe we are confronted with an aesthetic which is in sharp contrast to what today is considered “True Art”.

In her paintings we do not find the avant-gardist’s praise of what is the latest or any abstract concept leading the way forward. Instead she offers a historical orientation and holds a wish to emphasize the concrete sensual aspects of the objects. Committed to traditional European figurative painting she creates a pictorial world with clear references to evocative mood paintings of the 19th century as well as the work by Tizian. In other words, as a painter she is unmistakably unresponsive to the essential values of Modernism of the 20th century. Her answer to proclamations that the academic figurative tradition is today a dead art form is just simply to paint in this tradition, and she is indisputably very talented.

Without any hesitation she refers to her work as kitsch, providing kitsch stands for what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega Gasset’s calls “experienced reality”, which is trying to render human form and emotional feelings.

In order to understand Helene Knoop’s expression it is necessary to put her work in relation to a direction taken in Norwegian art since the 1960s, which has been in contrast to the hegemony of Modernism. The central and most influential painter in this group is Odd Nerdrum who has made a name for himself both nationally and internationally through his genuinely original style and for his drive to revive the old master painting aesthetic.

The distinctive characteristic of what has been called The Nerdrum School or The Norwegian School is the emphasis of classical ideals and stress on craftsmanship. Among some in this group of painters there is a pronounced criticism of today’s society in general and a conscious distance from modernity. Helene Knoop, as a result, is not without role models among her contemporary colleagues but by allowing herself to be inspired by the call for craftsmanship and denying the manifests of modernity she has chosen the path of an outsider.

In her portraits Knoop conveys the personality of the sitter in terms of physical likeness as well as reflection of the soul. She allows herself to become absorbed in easily recognizable emotions without the ironic detachment which we have become used to seeing. The same orientation toward what is human can be found in her large figurative compositions where she brings the viewer into a mythic world and tells the timeless story of the various male stages of life and the struggle between man and woman. These are myths in the sense that she communicates basic human conditions regardless of time and place. But simultaneously, and this is a characteristic of her work, her paintings reflect a longing for a different and better world.