After the Second World War, society faced profound challenges: rebuilding what had been destroyed while simultaneously imagining a new future. In this period, both a desire for reckoning and a strong belief in progress emerged. New technologies, new ideas, and new ways of living also left a clear mark on the arts.
From the 1950s onwards, artists increasingly began to work with unconventional materials, new techniques, and experimental modes of practice. Questions of what art could be—and what role it should play in society—became ever more central.
Nordic artists were closely connected to international currents, and the idea of the solitary artistic genius was challenged. Instead, communities and networks emerged across national borders, where similar ideas and forms of expression developed in parallel in different parts of the world.
Featuring around 150 works from The Tangen Collection, the exhibition shows how artists of this period explored new forms of expression, processes, and perspectives. Anything could become art: mass-produced materials, objects, images, and references drawn from art history. Rebellion and Optimism reflects a time when art both engaged directly with its present moment—and dared to imagine something entirely new.
About Stories from The Tangen Collection
Between Dreams and Reality. Stories from The Tangen Collection is part of a larger collaborative project between Kunstsilo and art historian and external curator Steinar Gjessing. Over many years, Gjessing has contributed to the development of the Tangen Collection—which today comprises nearly 7,000 works of art—and his experience and perspectives are highly relevant to Kunstsilo’s ongoing work with the stewardship and future management of the collection.
The exhibition presents, for the first time, a substantial number of artworks recently acquired from the Canica Art Collection. The Canica Collection was built up in the years following the turn of the millennium by the well-known business leader Stein Erik Hagen. When Steinar Gjessing was appointed as art advisor, the collection underwent a significant shift and took on a new direction, with a stronger emphasis on acquiring experimental and avant-garde art from the Nordic countries.
This major expansion has deepened the Tangen Collection and added a number of key works by central Nordic artists of the twentieth century—further strengthening its position as a vital source of insight into the Nordic modernist tradition.
The three exhibitions that make up this project are conceived as parts of one overarching whole. The intention has been to highlight some of the most important focal points of the collection, thereby outlining key trajectories in recent Nordic art that might otherwise be less readily visible.