NORDIC ART HISTORY ROUNDTABLES: NEW DIRECTIONS IN NORDIC ART HISTORY

What are some of the conversations that are shaping Nordic art history today? Moving beyond a historically prevalent focus on national romanticism and identity, in the first of a two-part roundtable series we will hear from art historians and curators about their ongoing research on and curatorial interests in the visual and material cultures of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands.

Chair: 

Christopher Riopelle, National Gallery, London

Christopher Riopelle is Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery. He has held curatorial positions at J. Paul Getty Museum, CA, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Exhibitions in London include Forest, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection (2011); Peder Balke, with Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø (2014-15); Australia's Impressionists (2016-17); Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, with Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2022-23). He has overseen acquisitions by Balke, Bellows, Calame, Dahl, Gallen-Kallela, Hodler and Ring. Riopelle is co-curator of the National Gallery Bicentenary exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (forthcoming September 2024). 

Speakers:

Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen

Isabelle Gapp is an art historian who writes and teaches at the intersections of landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. She is an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Isabelle leads the British Academy-funded project From the Floe Edge and multi-grant awarded project Teaching Arctic Environments. She is the author of A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (Lund Humphries, 2024).

Bart Pushaw, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga 

Bart Pushaw is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. His research and curatorial work examine Arctic art since the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and its relationship to the Black Atlantic. He works closely with museum collections in and out of the Arctic to propel the visibility and accessibility of Inuit, especially Kalaallit, cultural heritage and advance repatriation campaigns.

Jenny Ramkalawon, British Museum

Jennifer Ramkalawon is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Nordic Graphic Art at the British Museum. She is currently working on a project funded by the AKO Foundation acquiring works on paper by Nordic artists from the late 1930s to the present day for an exhibition opening at the British Museum in 2025. Her main interests are post-war European, British and American artists and late 19th-century art and culture. She is author of Kitaj Prints, a catalogue raisonné (British Museum, 2013), Maggi Hambling Touch (British Museum, 2016), The Prints of Toulouse-Lautrec (British Museum, 2007)

Image: John Savio, Man with Bull Reindeer, between 1928 and 1938. Handcoloured woodblock print on paper. Nasjonalmusset, Oslo, Norway.

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