Catherine Knight: Long Shadows is the first solo exhibition of paintings by Catherine Knight inspired by her trip to Oslo and Åsgårdstrand, Norway, to visit the landscape that inspired Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
Catherine Knight (b.1982) is a painter, working in oils, gouache and watercolours based in Bristol. She layers personal and collective stories into her paintings through landscapes, real, imagined and remembered.
The paintings in this exhibition were all based on Knight’s experience of travelling to Norway in February 2022. Knight visited Oslo and Åsgårdstrand, a small town on the Oslo Fjord, which was a constant source of inspiration for Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863—1944), and where he painted many of his famous works in the 1890s and early 1900s, including Melancholy, Girls on a Bridge, and The Voice.
Knight is drawn to the openness of Munch’s painting style, his energetic, sketchy and unfinished quality, which Knight considers as enabling the viewer a way into the painting and the emotional spaces Munch creates in his work. Knight’s own approach to painting is defined by her vital use of colour, which locates her images in an in-between state of being, “It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples, and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason, the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish” [Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own].
Knight has admired Munch’s work since a young age, and this trip was a long-held ambition to visit the places that had informed his paintings and to see the important collection of his work held at the Munch Museum in Oslo.
The day Knight visited Åsgårdstrand it was a cold but bright February day with an intense blue sky. Knight recalls how the low winter sun presented her with her own lone, long shadow while the experience of visiting the landscape that had served as a fixed point of continuity throughout Munch’s life sparked thoughts of the long shadow cast by Munch’s work for generations to come.
This exhibition was the first solo presentation of this series of paintings and was accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.
Catherine Knight: Long Shadows - Exhibition Catalogue
Catherine Knight, Long Shadows, 2022, Oil on linen, 160 x 120 cm ©The Artist
Catherine Knight, Lykkehuset, 2022, Oil on board, 30 x 23 cm ©The Artist
Catherine Knight in her Studio, Bristol