Hanneline Røgeberg: Hard Sauce

Thomas Erben is pleased to present his first solo exhibition with Oslo-born, Brooklyn-based painter Hanneline Røgeberg. In the exhibited paintings, the artist works with traces of local, factual and personal narrative, exceeding these details in works that push against their own structural limits as records, as paintings, and as codes.

The exhibition includes a selection of earlier works that serve to highlight Røgeberg's engagement with figuration. In Baldwin (2010), the artist paints a figure from the chest up, standing with arms behind its head. The warm tones of the subject's flesh are scraped back and forth across the surface of the painting, with a haze of non-descriptive brushmarks pushing forward towards the upper center. Balzac XII (2007) exhibits a similar treatment, where the cropped form of a softly modeled torso is squeegeed and loosened in broad swathes. In scraping down these images, Røgeberg brings both material and felt presence to the surface, losing control and gaining intimacy in the same gesture. In Balzac III (2007), the title becomes a pun in a close-up rendering of testicles – a symbol conjured everywhere, but which cannot itself be a metaphor for anything else. The disturbed paint surface resists a distant reading of the image, making this maximally vulnerable object swing back in your face.