NEVER FELT LIKE THIS
Lena Trydal
8.08.25 - 31.08.25
Opening hours:
Vernissage 8.08 6-9 pm
Saturdays and Sundays 1-4 pm or by appointment
Each year MLAG is curated thematically. This year we discuss the theme `heavy in love´ after French Sociologist Roland Barthes´ A Lover´s Discourse. The book is a collection of fragments about love from Plato, Nietzche, and Goethe published in 1977. In the preface, Barthes tells us that “the lover's discourse of today is one of an extreme solitude”. Being in love is isolating on many levels. Almost 50 years later, the state of love, finding it, and our feelings toward it - are in a state of alienation. Lena Trydal’s ‘Never Felt Like This’ presents work interrogating Barthes’ assumptions. Barthes argues that love is “forsaken”, “disparaged, or derided” by the realm of natural and social sciences. But Barthes suggests love is an “unreal” thing that is nonetheless still affirmed.
Love´s affirmation as a subject, a driver, and an adversario has been taken up by artists since the first cave paintings and continues to pose conundrums at MLAG. But what is it about love`s mediation in today´s frenzied and confident pop culture media landscape that makes it something needing to be navigated? … something to be mistrusted yet kind of affirmed? Lena Trydal´s series of oil paintings on stretched canvas parlays as lover´s do with what Barthes calls the “unreal” of the language of love - when the mechanisms of our rational faculties fail us and we still affirm love´s authenticity.
Trydal plums the world of reality TV shows and royalty-free stock images from the net, checking back in with the “unreal”. The process might be likened to found object art - where Trydal is the wizard tossing our readymade referencescape for a loop. In her own words, “the world of reality-TV and shows such as Love is Blind, Love Island, Married at First Sight, The Ultimatum and Perfect Match—a realm brimming with red roses, cheesy pickup lines, diamond rings, and clichéd gender norms”, these are the subjects and objects of aesthetic study. What story do they tell when appropriated by Trydal - whisked out into the public gaze again, sultry, still dressed up - yet naked?
One possible way of seeing the evolution of the readymade is to see it as a movement pushing back against capitalism’s demand for growth. Trydal’s series of figurative paintings are no upside down urinals, yet in a post-Duchamp world we see objects differently - aesthetically, we see their relational potential more than we did before. Hal Foster - the old Princeton professor of Art History was freaked out by a younger generation of figurative painters since the 70’s. He worried that if the paintings weren’t meta-artistic - if they failed to have a critical self-referentiality - their appropriation of culture risks becoming spectacle. Trydal’s disruption of the everydayness of finding love does as Robert Grober and Cindy Sherman have done before her - make art make us step-outside of our assumptions about what has come before us. Trydal’s painting’s sometimes imitate the selected source yet, their power is in the evidence of the artist’s hand. It draws our attention to the question of making. In elevating low culture, the artist returns to the conversation of "art-as-simulacrum", asking what the simulation substantiates?
Trydal’s exhibition is full of paradoxes and the disenchantment of proximity. The act of drawing us closer to the hyper-detailed has the surprising effect of bringing us further away from its intended symbolism, zooming further and furher out, deepening our relationship to the superficial painted back upon itself.
Curated by Michael Laundry
MLAG is supported by the City of Bergen
Lena Trydal (b. 1994 in Kristiansand, Norway) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo. She works with figurative paintings on contemporary pop and internet culture, using a colorful and humorous painting style. She has a bachelor’s degree in aesthetic studies from the University of Oslo and has studied fine arts at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (The Hague, Netherlands) and Metàfora (Barcelona). In 2022, Trydal participated in the opening exhibition of the new National Museum in Norway, “Jeg kaller det kunst”, a portrait of the Norwegian Royal family - a polemic work discussed widely in the press. She has also exhibited at “The State’s 135th art exhibition, Autumn Exhibition 2022” at Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Artists’ Autumn Exhibition (KE) at Den Frie Udstillingbygning, Copenhagen (2021 & 2023), IRL Gallery (New York), KöSK Gallery (Oslo), TM51 (Oslo) as well as at Roodkapje Rot(t)terdam (Netherlands), among others. Works by Trydal have been purchased by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo).
bGVuYXRyeWRhbCB8IGdtYWlsICEgY29t / @lenatrydal / lenatrydal.com
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