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Laudatio Written by Dagfinn S. Skoglund Dagfinn Skoglund (MA/MBA) has been associated with the Oslo National Academy of the Arts since 2007, and is educated by the same school, the Nottingham Polytechnic and BI – Norwegian School of Management. He teaches in knitting. In addition to teaching, Dagfinn Skoglund is responsible for managing the knitting workshops. Dagfinn Skoglund has for many years had responsible administrative positions and is running his own company next to teaching at KhiO.
Malin Kjelsrud is perhaps a new acquaintance for us as a painter, but the pictures she paints is immediately recognizable. Not necessarily because we know who they portray - even though the observing viewer may draw a conclusion or two - but because what she expresses in her paintings is so accessible. She bids us figures, persons, people that she gives almost superhuman characteristics by enhancing their characters into almost archetypes.
With her brushstroke, technique and especially the use of colors, she distorts these - in them selves common people - into something else, something more or less than they really are. These paintings are true because the tell us that we really never see that we think we see when we see a person. Malin Kjelsrud lets us look at the people through a kaleidoscope which brings out the possible variations of us, all out potentials, good as bad, but she does not judge us. She lets everybody shine, beam in their own special and very suiting light.
And by her skillfully developed sense of coloring, Malin lets the colors express and enhance the mood she wants her «avatar» to express. Sometimes it may seem merely decorative because it is so efficient and seems so reliable, but there is always a deeper thought behind. And this thought is easy for the viewer to acquire, because Malin is a knower of humans and she has been through enough in life to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. She is neither interested in feigning about this, she «tells it like it is», she paints exactly as she sees it.
Malin Kjelsrud is a great talent, but she is autodidact and has therefore not been taught the hyperbole techniques that any art student today wrap them selves and their work in. But no user guide is presented, no artistic manifest that is supposed to put the viewer in the right mood so that we will «understand» what the artist means. And thank god for that! Malin Kjelsrud is outermost perceptive, and she relates acutely to what she observes and feels. And she expresses that through her paintings, as a primitive power that manages to mirror the time she is a part of an channel it out in a time-typical and relevant expression.
Malin Kjelsrud employs people she knows personally and gives them new dimensions, supplies them with both glamour, substance and meaning, but lets them simultaneously express the worlds collected and accumulated tristesse, sin and perversions. Angels and devils in a beautiful and colorful mix, just like in the reality. Or a form of modern icons for the 21st century, a kind of «delicious & dirty avatars», her representatives for the world as it could have been, as it is and as it will be. She feels the pulse of the world - that means the people and uses her own circle - the world she knows best - to express this. Macro-cosmos through micro-cosmos. Andy Warhol had his Factory with its protagonists, Malin Kjelsrud creates her own Olympos and populates it with her own archetypes, if not to say gods.
In a time where everybody wants to be an artist (or at least work within media, film and design), and the academies are bulging of hopeful, but often tragic cases that has nothing else to contribute than incoherent theories and postulates about what they really had planned to express - had they only managed, in such a time it is a pure and clean joy to come across a talent like Malin Kjelsrud, who «uneducated» are superior to 90% of the eager «wannabes» that so exhaustingly populates the parnasses of art these days. One does not need a manual to understand her concept, only eyes, heart and brain, for her opus speaks for her - as it should. Thank you.