Galleri Star

For our summer exhibition at Galleri Star, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium is delighted to welcome our visitors to 

Jørgen Dobloug: Punktum. Punktum. Komma, strek – å male er en lystig lek 

(Jørgen Dobloug: Full stop. Full stop. Comma, line – painting is a game with signs).

In a Norwegian context Jørgen Dobloug (b. 1945 / NO) is an important figure, an artist who chose to leave the country and what he described as a too rigid art education in search of his own artistic path. Dobloug has had a long career with many exhibitions at home and abroad, and it is with great pleasure that we can now present his art for the Kunstlaboratorium's visitors.

In the early 1970s the young, ambitious Jørgen Dobloug applied for a place at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, but didn't get in because of his undeveloped drawing skills. Or more correctly, his inability to draw naturalistically, or anatomically correct – which at the time was an entrance qualification. This did not stop Dobloug who instead enrolled at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. It was in Joseph Beuys' monumental sculpture class that the artist embarked on a seven-year-long exploration of art and life, a journey which – according to Dobloug – continues to this day. Beuys (1921-1986) was by then a living legend in the international art world, and Dobloug was inspired by his credo that every person has an artist deep within.

Jørgen Dobloug represents something "different" in Norwegian art. To call him "alien" would be to go too far, even though he gladly calls Germany his second home. In the title of the exhibition we have tried to capture something of this "otherness": Punktum. Punktum. Komma, strek – å male er en lystig lek  (approximately translated: Full stop. Full stop. Comma, line – painting is a game with signs.) Dobloug does indeed adopt a playful approach to art. But this concept of playing and laughing through art also embraces reflection, attitude, and resistance – a "trinity" of values we hope the exhibition, produced in cooperation with the artist, explores and communicates.

It opens at the same time as the summer show in the Kunstlaboratorium: Saturday 4. May at 13:30. Galleri Star is located in the new exhibition spaces of the Kunstlaboratorium, and Dobloug's art is the first to be shown there.

Welcome!