The idea of the «period» in art is most closely associated with Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period (1901-04), said to have come about as a result of personal struggle and loss. Norwegian Artist Steinar Haga Kristensen’s latest production comes about as the result of what he describes as a very “brown time”, marked by the political, moral and identity struggles of our contemporary world. And so, it is called his “Brown Period”. The first tendencies of this Brownness were present as early as 2008 in the exhibition “Brunt og Vanskelig” (Brown and Difficult) in Asker, Norway. Since then, the tendency is mostly subsumed by Haga Kristensen’s rich, though somewhat more polemical work, revolving amongst other things around the repetition of subjectively primeval motifs. In the exhibition Période brune (Les Origines moqueuses et Sceptique du doute) at Passerelle Haga Kristensen presents numerous new objects defining a recent turn of the “Brown Period”. The objects combines, ceramics, tapestry, alfresco, oil paint and casts, plaster sculpting and woodwork. The works are accompanied by an eleven-channel video installment featuring 3d animations of the objects on display.

Haga Kristensen´s vast production is characterized by a satirical romanticization of the modern project. Through visual and conceptual perversion of individualism, liberalism, rationalism and secularism the work discloses the extensive complications of positive production of future in today’s social and economic situation.