Stavanger, Norway
With geometric abstraction, it can be tricky to know which way is up. Dossen Bjørnevik accounts for this most delightfully by signing some of her paintings twice, on two different edges, and including multiple hooks on the back. Likewise, one might wish to view these artworks horizontally, laid out flat rather than hung vertically on a wall. She calls them landscapes, after all, even if they show none of the features one might expect to find in that representational category. But they are there, blocks of color corresponding to the way land gets divided up by cartographers or to the type of buildings one finds in Stavanger and Swansea, elements clearly recognizable in Bjørnevik’s drawings even if not quite in her paintings. The history of geometric abstraction is filled with this kind of tension, from the “Prouns” of El Lissitzky to the bush paintings of Aboriginal Australians, from the urban boogie-woogie of Mondrian to the adaptable weavings of Sophie Tauber-Arp. All of it looks deceptively simple but rewards close, slow looking, the kind that notices that Bjørnevik’s oil-pastel “Landscape” of 2016, which appears at first to be a regular grid of color stripes, is in fact full of variation.
—Lori Waxman, March 16, 5:39 PM