Culture evening - Maria Ingeborg Bagge Fosse

"I want to weave as if I were painting" - a survey of Birgit Hagen's textile collages Gamal gard, Sun and little girls and Horses on the stallion from 1943-45 

Through this lecture, Birgit Hagen's nascent art in the 1940s will be introduced based on the three textile collages Old farm, Sun and little girls and Horses on the stallion. Birgit Hagen's autobiographical text "Sketches from a childhood" (1948-1951) forms an impression of what it was like to grow up on the small farm Brattegardshagen in Vats i Ål municipality in 1912. Excerpts from "Sketches from a childhood" will be presented and read into the three textile collages. In this way, themes related to place identity and motif selection during the Second World War will also be presented, while also outlining a backdrop for the textiles' conception, namely Birgit Hagen's schooling at the Statens Kvindelige Industriskole during the occupation period as well as an art historical contextualization of textile art during modernism. 

Maria Ingeborg Bagge Fosse (b. 1987) is writing a master's dissertation on Birgit Hagen at Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Oslo.

Photo: Ansgar Valbø