NATTSYNER - SUSANNA ANTONSSON
EXHIBITION
18.06.2026 - 08.08.2026
Opening: June 18, 17:00–20:00
Throughout history, the night has been a necessary time for finding the peace required for creative work. The painter Barbro Östlihn assisted her husband with his paintings during the day and used the night to create her own. Sigrid Undset wrote late into the night while caring for her children during the day. Nattsyner presents a series of paintings that explore the pace of the night and the movement into stillness. The expectations of daylight rationality and the demands of everyday life seem absent in the darkness. The night becomes a representation of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” the space she emphasized as essential to the possibility of creation.
Antonsson uses repetition as a method for approaching thoughts on the conditions of attention. The motifs become like revenants that continually return to remind us of something forgotten. One of the recurring motifs in the exhibition points to the checkered patterns found on everyday household textiles. Using these grids, Antonsson constructs a structural and simplified painterly language. Modernist artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko similarly painted lines and simplified fields of color. They did so with the ambition of reaching beyond the earthly and toward the eternal. In contrast to this aspiration, everyday objects are always present in Antonsson’s paintings. Curtains and kitchen towels point to how we remain bound to life on earth. Yet we can always look up at the moon at night.
Susanna Antonsson holds an MFA from the The Art Academy in Bergen. She has exhibited at, among other venues, Galleri BOX (SE), LNM (NO), Hordaland Kunstsenter (NO), Galleri Knipsu (NO), Kristiansand Kunsthall (NO), Not Quite (SE), and Tag Team Studio (NO). Antonsson lives and works in Bergen.