Kurt Johannessen
About the artist
Kurt Johannessen deals with performance, books, video and installation. He has produced about 280 different performances in Europe, Asia and America since 1980. His performance often takes a poetic and minimalist form. He has exhibitited in numerous places in Norway, including Bergen Art Museum and the House of Artists, Oslo.
Johannessen is also a publisher of art books. Many of them are text-related, but some are based on artwork and photography.
His text works are often one-sentence stories. They are visual, poetic and sometimes humorous. He has produced over 80 books so far. Some of them have been purchased by the Norwegian Council of Culture, and a number of the books have been translated into English.
Presence in a situation is fundamental to my work. I try to keep whatever as open as possible so as not to precondition the possibilities. This is the starting point. At the same time, however, I am concerned with finding situations that can generate qualities I have not experienced before. I frequently minimize to one image and then create microscopic variations within this frame. At other times the situation has more complex implications but remains within a poetical minimalist expression. My works are often site-specific.