Oslo exhibition puts Rothko’s paintings on paper at the centre

The National Museum in Oslo, Norway, opens “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” on 16 May 2024. The exhibition is scheduled to continue until 22 September. Euronews describes a presentation that moves beyond the artist’s familiar large canvases, bringing his work on another support into view. The choice of paper gives the exhibition a specific focus without reducing it to a display of preparatory sketches.

Paper as a finished painting

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which presented the preceding exhibition from November 2023 to March 2024, explains that Rothko regarded many of these works as complete paintings. Its account follows a range from figurative subjects and surrealist experiments to rectangular colour fields. That historical description is useful background; the number of works in the Washington presentation should not be treated as the number displayed in Oslo.

The distinction between a painting’s support and its status is central to understanding the subject. A work on paper is not automatically an unfinished stage on the way to a canvas. Looking at it on its own terms allows attention to move from the familiar hierarchy of materials to the decisions visible within the picture.

A way to approach the exhibition

Three questions offer a straightforward starting point for comparing the works:

• Does the composition depend on recognisable figures or on relationships between shapes?
• How do the edges of one area of colour meet the surrounding surface?
• What changes when the viewer looks at the whole composition and then at a smaller passage?

These are prompts for looking, rather than claims about a single intended emotional response. Two viewers can notice different relationships without either having failed to understand the work. The exhibition’s narrow material focus makes such comparisons possible without requiring every picture to illustrate the same story about the artist.

An exhibition with its own limits

The opening offers a chance to examine one part of Rothko’s practice in greater detail. It does not imply that paper replaced canvas throughout his career, or that every work on paper belongs to one late period. The useful contrast is between the selected material and the image of Rothko that visitors may already carry with them.

Sources: Euronews; National Gallery of Art exhibition archive.

Sources: Euronews; National Gallery of Art.