A Kassen Carnegie Art Award 2014

Oslo Kunstforening is pleased to announce the exhibition A Kassen Carnegie Art Award 2014 by the Copenhagen-based artists group A Kassen.

A Kassen are Christian Bretton-Meyer, Morten Steen Hebsgaard, Søren Petersen and Tommy Petersen.

The Carnegie Art Award, established in 1998 by the Swedish investment bank, is one of the world’s largest prizes for painting. The 2014 shortlist exhibition, with over 150 paintings by 17 artists, opened in Stockholm in November 2013. A Kassen won third prize for their series of works The Color of Things.

The exhibition should have toured to Copenhagen and Oslo, but Carnegie withdrew their sponsorship for 'financial reasons'. A Kassen used their prize money to get the whole show copied in Xiamen Painting Village in China; the A Kassen Carnegie Art Award 2014 was then shown instead of the original at Den Frie in Copenhagen. We are very pleased to be able to bring their show to Oslo, following the planned Carnegie tour. The work itself amplifies the modern situation in which works of art are most often experienced as digital or printed reproductions. Here, the reproductions are actually also an original conceptual work by A Kassen, while the original paintings have become source material.

A Kassen make site-specific and performance-based installations, photographs and sculptures. Influenced by conceptual art they often explore the effect of changing contexts on value and meaning.

The exhibition is part of The Drawing Biennial 2014, a curatorial collaboration between Kunsthall Oslo and Tegnerforbundet/The Drawing Association. The Biennial takes place at seven different venues in central Oslo and opens Friday 10 October.

The theme of the 2014 biennial is Drawing after Modernism, or how the future affects the past. The exhibition explores the ways that artists have used the practice of drawing to respond to the radical shifts in the concept and possibilities of art production that took place in the 20th century. We are very pleased to be working with the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to present the key work of the Biennial, Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing. Rauschenberg's work is one of the most famous iconoclastic gestures in modern art, yet it is also the work which above all others reinvented the radical potential of the medium of drawing for contemporary art.

The Drawing Biennial will be accompanied by a free newspaper which will function as both catalogue and exhibition guide.