Dag Erik Elgin

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BOMBA
Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
8.11 -15.12. 2024

Light is an ambivalent entity in modernism. Tied to technological innovations like gas and electric lighting, it represents the light of urban self-presentation: the light of consumerism as well as the flâneur. The average citizen also becomes enchanted, as articulated by Sonia Delaunay in her painting Disques Electriques, where a lost aura is rediscovered as electric radiance. It is the light of modern science, industry, photography, and film. But the light of modernism casts long and sharp shadows; It is also the light of war, of grenades and bombs. This ambivalent light source forms the basis for BOMBA, a word in Spanish that has a double meaning, signifying both lightbulb and bomb.

In Picasso’s Guernica, the horrors of war are illuminated by flashes produced by the brutal bombardment of the Basque town; at the top of the painting, a lightbulb is set within an eye-like oval shape from which sharp light and dramatic shadows radiate. The artificial light source is framed by a crown of white and black rays in grisaille—a greyscale palette historically referred to as Todmalerei or ”death painting.” The bare lightbulb with its glowing filament appears as a symbol of a flash of explosive destruction, the emergency lighting within a bomb shelter, but also the post-catastrophe light that exposes the atrocities of war in the work of art.

In the exhibition BOMBA, the central element is a mural on the back wall where Guernica once hung as part of the French Exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, immediately after it had been shown at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. The mural now consists of a matte grey monochrome surface the size of Guernica (349.3 × 776.6 cm), interrupted by an enlarged figure: the lightbulb that casts a symbolic light over the room where Guernica was shown. In the opposite room, viewers are met with a Bauhaus pendant lamp from the period when Guernica was displayed at Kunstnernes Hus, lowered to eye level. Similar lamps can still be found in the café, but in the exhibition rooms, they have been replaced by wall-washer lighting. The original pendant marks the central axis of the room’s entrance. It is hung from one of the original electric mounting points in the ceiling.

In the Director’s Room facing the park, the painting Originals (Figure 1911) is suspended. It refers to Analytical Cubism, an optical prerequisite for the depiction of the figures in Guernica. In the architecture of Kunstnernes Hus, where functionalism is combined with neoclassicism, the painting enters a dialogue with Per Krohg’s Art Deco-inspired fresco The Artist’s Thorny Path to the Heights at the central axis of the stairwell. Guernica is similarly marked by a duality between modernism and classicism, but unlike Cubism, where fragmentation occurs within an interior, a grid appears to dissolve the distinction between inside and outside in Guernica. The dissolution of the figures in the painting is not the result of a formal experiment here; rather, it conveys an imprint of the horrors of modern warfare. Nonetheless, an ambivalent light is cast over the anti-war icon Guernica, for as Georges Bataille emphasizes in his text Rotten Sun, modernism’s radical artistic transgressions are inextricably linked to brutality and the aesthetics of violence.