TONJE MOE PETTERSEN
Norway | Born 1978 | Lives and works in Gratangen, Norway
Tonje Moe Pettersen is a Norwegian contemporary artist whose distinctive paintings move between figuration and abstraction, creating imaginative worlds populated by enigmatic figures, fragmented forms and unexpected narratives. Born in 1978, Pettersen studied in Australia, completing a Master’s degree in Visual Art at Monash University in Melbourne. She has worked professionally as an artist since 2005 and now lives and works in Gratangen in northern Norway.
Central to Pettersen’s practice is the gathering and reassembling of imagery. Elements are removed from their original context and combined to form new visual narratives, allowing familiar images to become strange, theatrical or dreamlike. Her figurative works frequently explore representations of women and the way ideas of beauty, perfection and the female body are presented in contemporary media.
Across her work, faces and figures emerge from richly painted and sometimes ambiguous surroundings. Some paintings are immediately recognisable as portraits, while others dissolve into expressive areas of colour and movement. Works such as Queen of Knight, Honey (Lady of the Night) and Keeping Guard at the Gate of Thought demonstrate her interest in strong female imagery, while paintings such as The Egg, The Channel and Equilibrium II reveal a looser and more painterly approach. The breadth of the Plum Gallery collection provides an unusually good view of these different aspects of her practice.
Pettersen’s work can also be playful and narrative. Characters, animals and symbolic objects appear in unexpected combinations, creating scenes that seem to belong to stories whose beginnings and endings are deliberately left unresolved. In other works, the figure gives way almost completely to colour, gesture and abstraction.
After returning to northern Norway, Pettersen continued her artistic practice in Gratangen. In 2013 she was announced as one of eight northern Norwegian artists selected from 55 applicants for the major Goliat art project, commissioned for the Goliat offshore platform in the Barents Sea and its operational centre in Hammerfest. She contributed acrylic paintings on canvas and was selected for the individuality of her artistic expression, spacious compositions and abstracted forms.
Her work therefore brings together two quite different influences: the contemporary figurative practice she developed during her years in Australia and the more spacious, expressive direction evident in her later Norwegian work. Throughout both, Pettersen maintains a strong interest in colour, atmosphere and the possibilities of transforming familiar imagery into something psychologically suggestive and distinctly her own.
