Welcome to the opening of Jenny Rydhagen´s exhibition Close Encounters at TWT, a space for contemporary art in a public place.

Close Encounters is a site specific art project with its local starting point at the Botanical Garden at Tøyen in Oslo. With this project Jenny Rydhagen directs attention to the Botanical Garden and their campaign for a new greenhouse. Close Encounters is not documentation, but a balance between an abstraction of the actual place and the reality inherent in the artwork. The work also functions as a continuation of Rydhagen´s previous projects; Parallel Universe and Green,

The Botanical Garden has for many years been in need of a new greenhouse. They have therefore started a campaign where they are trying to find sponsors from the private sector. The plants are suffering from lack of space, and the gardens can’t grow the exotic plants, which are desirable. This results in a very poor collection of exotic plants. With these current politics Norway may end up the only country in Europe lacking a large public greenhouse.

Jenny Rydhagen (Born 1965)
Rydhagen has her education from the Art Academy in Oslo and Chelsea School of Art in London. She lives and works in Oslo.
She has participated in a number of shows, group and solo shows, both in Norway and abroad. Her artworks have been acquired by the Arts Council Norway, The National Foundation For Art in Public Buildings, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Norwegian Hydro and Telenor.

Throughout the past ten years, Jenny’s work has in one way or the other been an investigation of the ambivalent relationship between nature and culture. She has been photographing nature that looks like culture and culture that imitates nature. Though the subject of her work seemingly is nature in various forms, her main focus is rather the constructed images and illusions we have of nature than nature itself. We very seldom observe nature without referring to other images we have seen before; in fact we often experience nature as an image rather than a space. When we observe a landscape from a distance, we feel we can grasp something about the concept of what nature is, but the closer we get the less we see. Sometimes to experience nature we need to be removed from it.

In this new series “Close encounters”, it is the human scrutinizing gaze on nature that is in focus, the longing to understand nature by observing it. This series show portraits where plants and people are portrayed on an equal level.