Pop quiz: who’s the national painter of Norway? The guy who painted ‘The Scream’, right? Wrong, the actual owner of that title is Harald Sohlberg. But if that’s art historical news to you, don’t feel ashamed. This retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first major show of the artist’s paintings and drawings ever in the UK.
Sohlberg’s muse was the Norwegian landscape and its snow-dusted rooftops, meadows of spring daisies and flat, low ridges of coastal cliffs. Harald ran out into those villages and hills and hollered: ‘Let there be light!’(Metaphorically speaking. There’s no historical evidence to suggest he actually behaved like this).
On a basic level, his paintings are competent, unfussy landscapes of lakes, paths, trees… the usual. It’s the light and the sky that makes them worth a serious look. Sohlberg’s paintings hum with the strange glow of the midnight sun or prickle with evening sunlight splayed through branches.
There’s a very specific bit of sky he gets right, the thin strip of brighter glow where sky hits land. It looks like the world has just begun, or is just about to end – a feeling intensified by the absence of people.
The few times Sohlberg focuses on figures the results are quite beautiful. There’s a gorgeous drawing of a female nude, along with a shoal of moonlight-illuminated mermaids.
But it’s that mysterious light inspiring the show’s other addition, a new sculpture by contemporary artist Mariele Neudecker. Housed in the mausoleum, a translucent tank filled with rows of trees is lit with natural light filtered through the space’s yellow windows. It looks like a mini forest set in pineapple jelly, an eerie fairytale wood.
Eerie but, like Sohlberg’s paintings, also attractive. It’s hard to look at this distinctly Nordic scenery and not start getting hyyge envy followed by a compulsion to book a plane ticket to Oslo.