TORE MAGNE GUNDERSEN
THE GRINDER / THE GRINDER / THE KNIFE
03.12 - 15.12.22

Tore Magne Gundersen's work The Sluket / The Mill / The Knife was shown in the Vestibule on Trafo Kunsthall in connection with Asker Municipality's purchase of the work from the Autumn Exhibition 2022.

The dream of the man in the basement

It's evening, I'm 6-7 maybe 8 years old, and I'm lying in bed trying not to fall asleep. A streak of warm light comes from the door that's ajar. I try to think of something nice - a flower meadow, maybe. But like every evening for a long time, my eyelids close again and the same dream takes over. In the dream, slow, dull footsteps approach from outside. I feel compelled to go out into the hallway and see who's there... No, no one... Something forces me down the long stairs to the first floor anyway. In the room at the end of the hallway, the door is open. There sits a towering silhouette of a figure on the bed - heavy and darkened. In the last scene of the nightmare, two huge arms stretch out towards me. And then I wake up.

The Gutter / The Grinder / The Knife can be seen both as individual works, and as one combined work. They have links to childhood nightmares and everything that is scary to a child's mind - trolls, the devil in hell, dangerous men, dangerous dogs, unknown sexuality, the darkness that appears within oneself, shadows and ghosts. A fear of being pulled down into the gutter, of being attacked by something unknown. Although they appear towering and frightening, the knitted textile also evokes a feeling of something safe, warm and protective. Like a large, home-knitted teddy bear. 

In addition to the personal, the work also represents something universal, which the threats in the world we live in now face. Fear of the future - of monsters we are being inexorably led towards, while they stretch their long arms towards us. Gundersen's works are created in a process, often without clear thoughts about what the finished result will be. Instead, one thing follows the other and thoughts, sensations, emotions and hands are the ones guiding the process. The process shapes the whole - something is added and something is subtracted. 

Tore Magne Gundersen learned to knit when he was 7-8 years old and it was the artist's mother who taught him. The first project was a yellow, or yellow-brown teddy bear. His mother told of a memory where one late evening she saw light from the children's room door that was ajar and when she looked in she saw a boy who was "sitting in bed knitting the teddy bear in the dim light, his eyes were red and shiny and as big as tin plates". 

Since then, Gundersen's interest in knitting waned, until fifty years later when the artist sat in his mother's armchair in her apartment at the senior center. Gundersen's mother was lying on sykehus after a bad fall. In a small chest of drawers he found yarn and knitting needles. There, YouTube channels became instructive on how to cast on, and the artist began knitting small flakes. Back home in Oslo, his interest in knitting continued and eventually the textile pieces grew to larger sizes. They were then mounted on string, such as in _Sluket / Kverna / Kniven_. The artist's mother died in 2016, but got to see the first knitted works.

Tore Magne Gundersen (b. 1957 in Froland in Agder) lives and works in Oslo. He is educated in ceramics at the Norwegian School of Crafts and Art (Oslo) and in painting and sculpture at the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts (Oslo). In recent years, Gundersen has exhibited at, among others, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall (Arendal), Oppland Kunstsenter (Lillehammer), Agder Kunstsenter (Kristiansand) and Studio Blikket (Steinkjer). The artist was featured with his work at the Høstutstillingen 2022. His works have been purchased by Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, KODE, Bomuldsfabriken, the National Museum and Asker kommune .

All photos: Tor S. Ulstein / KunstDok