The association Palanski Art is organizing another exhibit with my works at the Cutural Sentre in Nis, opening on Tuesday November 3, at noon, and I am very happy to show my work in Serbia again!

Link to the Catalogue: http://www.martindue.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Catalogue-Nis-2015-Martin-Due.pdf

The Norwegian Embassy in Belgrade has been kind to publish the following article:

          29.10.2015 //                     The Norwegian visual artist Martin Due’s expression of the very nature is back in Serbia, but this time in the gallery of the Cultural Center in Nis from November 3. (Skraćena verzija dostupna i na srpskom)

Scandinavian Spheres  present works by 15 selected members of the Association of Norwegian Printmakers. It is organized and curated by printmaker Martin Due with assistance from the Norwegian Printmakers gallery. The exhibition reflects some of contemporary Scandinavian printmaking in various media, as well as some expressions stretching into new forms of multiplied art communication. Though a wide diversity of expression the works are all selected in relation to the SGC International 2015 theme and our own ‘arctic’ inner or outer point of view.

The Association of Norwegian Printmakers was founded in 1919 and is part of the larger organization Norwegian Visual Artists.  The administration and gallery is situated in Oslo. Currently the organization has 330 members and takes pride in continuously working to maintain high quality and professional standards. A short presentation in English is found at http://www.norske-grafikere.no/pages.aspx?pageid=326 )

Martin Due – organizer/curator

DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE HERE: Catalogue – Scandinavian Spheres – SGC International 2015_D

The opening last night at the Center of Culture and Art in Aleksinac in Serbia was a very fine experience with many people attending; artists, professors from the Art Academy and the University in Nis, journalists, photographers the local TV station and a very responsive audience. It is a very evident and refreshing knowledge of, and respect for, the fine arts that we are not always so very used to in the Scandinavian countries.

The Norwegian embassy was represented by Chargé d’affairs Ms Jannicke Bain and Mr Uroš Ćulibrk, advisor and PA to the Ambassador. Ms Jannicke Bain spoke about the many cultural exchanges between Serbia and Norway and Mr Uroš Ćulibrk did a remarkable job with simultaneus translation between three languages; Norwegian, Serbian and English at an admirable speed. Also the mayor and the cultural administrator from the next city that the exhibit is going to visit, Bela Palanka, was attending the opening.

Dr. Kostic Palanski, heading the organization of artist, academics and writers, ‘Palanski Art’, that organize exhibits for cultural centers and galleries addressed the audience together with Mr. Marko Milandinovic, responsible for presenting the exhibition at the Center in Aleksinac and also responsible for the catalogue design and mounting of the exhibit.

 Beautiful guitar music also was providef by talented music students of the Aleksinac Music School.

The prints where very nicely mounted without frames on white background behind clear glass. A very clean mounting that gives a very open experience of the prints.

On Wednesday February 11, at the Center for Culture and
Arts in Aleksinac in Serbia my next solo exhibit will open. It is organized by Palanski Art in Nis.

At the exhibit 29 of my works spanning from 1991 and up til recent will be presented. Most of the works are combined etching tecniques, and also in combination with drypoint and engravings.

For the moment it looks like I will be able to travel there and be present at the opening, I very much look forward to be there and to visit Serbia.

Palanski Art have produced a beautiful catalogue for the exhibit, it can be vieved as a PDF here (4 mb download): MartinDueKatalog

The Cultural Centre in
Aleksinac

In my father’s workshop in Uppsala in Sweden, where I first was taught printmaking, this magnificent old press reigned and was a magnet, but restricted, attraction for both us kids as well as the art-buying visitors in the workshop. Built in Leipzig, Germany, in 1895 it was a highly priced precision tool for my father who was very particular about printing quality. It was badly damaged in a fire in 2004, only weeks before my father passed away.

The press was basically just a partly cracked and rusty pile of steel junk when it was dismantled and mowed in parts to my workshop in Norway, there it stood covered but outdoors for several years until I had a water leakage in my workshop last year that prompted a major rebuilding.

The floor was reinforced and work began restoring the press. I wore out two steel grinders getting the rust of it and put some of the best mechanics in the region to the test making new parts to the gearbox and the oak bearings.

   I also studied some untouched original Krause presses at the printing museum in Leipzig, Germany, before all was ready to move into the workshop and be mounted together. An interesting job since the heaviest parts are around 375 kilos, the whole construction comes at about 2000 kilos and the tolerances are in some places only 1/100 mm!

A new printing bed was ordered in composite material from Polymetal in the Netherlands and of course new blankets where fitted. Around December I could start to try printing with it. Nervously I turned the first print – it was perfect!    

Amazing German precision, I know now why my father so much appreciated and depended on this wonderful machinery.

On Wednesday this week (March 6th) I will open the exhibit ‘Over the Edge’ at Artifact Gallery on 84 Orchard St in New York. The gallery has choosen around 18 prints, mostly etchings and a few dry points, from the last 12 years of production. The opening reception is at 6 PM – should you happen to be in the area!

I was invited by the gallerist Serge Gregorian one and a half year ago to have a show at his gallery, which then had the name ‘New Art Center’ and was in the 7th floor close to Times Square. Since then the gallery has moved to a ground floor space on Orchard Street in Lower East side i New York and is now named Artifact (www.artifactnyc.net)

This is my first presentation in the US with at complete exhibition and it’s of course going to be interesting to see the reaction of an american audience. In the press release the gallery writes:

Whether by inclusion of panoramic scenes of the Nordic landscape or through close-ups studies, Martin Due’s etchings have within them a holistic quality that overrides the particulars we see framed within the vision of each subject matter. There is a palpable and necessary condition of positive ambiguity and other-worldliness in the artist’s works which pervades each scene and which brings it to an exquisitely high level of intelligibility There is that intangible “more” at play in the artist’s work whose very aura of suggestiveness, so hard to pin down and express in words, is proof of its measure.

The artist writes: ”My theme and line of work have earlier often been the storytelling aspects of stone structures and eroding mountain landscapes – for me perceived as metaphors of time and an indefinite changing and recreative process. Sometimes I have worked with identifiable landscape motifs, but since the story of the landscape often is revealed both in the large formations just as well as in the tiny details of the fractured stone, I often have constructed pictures where the large form and the small detail can play together and comment each other.”

This pre-verbal apprehension of the world, this feeling – tone that pervades Due’s work is one in which the slow and hazy flow of time seems to be materialized through light. It is through the passage of the sun’s rays that the viewer understands Due’s meditative approach to his calling, which evokes the capturing of the sublime moment. Each image, seemingly placid and well directed to engage meditations on the sublimities of natural wonders. The viewer is left to ponder on the distinctions that are made between an image of glaciers and rocks as “nature” and the concept of an etched and sometimes colored landscape itself, an acculturated construct.

 A Norwegian artist, through his etched descriptions encourages us to consider the “fugitive” Immateriality of the world. Paradoxically, it is the artist’s immersion within this immateriality, this grounding within the very stuff of life that sharpens his observational skills. The end result is a switching between different levels of reality, from the mundane to the exalted to the sublime and back. In his seeming determination to explore the extremes of the landscape, the artist becomes an extraordinary recorder of the ordinary gestures of nature.

 For more information and visuals ­­­­please contact ARTIFACT.