Mies van der Rohe Pavillion III

Vibeke Slyngstad studied art in Austria and Oslo. She works with figurative painting, often using photography as the basis for her imagery. Her style is almost photorealistic, and she depicts her scenes with thin, transparent brushstrokes that create a distinctive and almost washed out lighting effect. In the present century, Slyngstad has made use of elements and structures from iconic architecture, such as the Nordic Pavilion in Venice, designed by Sverre Fehn, Villa Stenersen in Oslo, and the Oslo Opera House. In 2009 she participated with the her “Modern Classics” series at the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the series she depicts a classic architectural surface complemented with fragments of human presence.

In the painting Mies van der Rohe Pavilion III, we see a segment of the pavilion designed by the renowned architect for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The segment of the building’s white surface has been placed high up in the picture plane, while a pool dominates the lower two-thirds of the picture. Human figures peer down into the water. But something other than the pavilion’s architecture is reflected in the pool. The Moorish palace Alhambra in Granada, from the mid-fourteenth century, is a building that also includes a pool as part of its architecture. The water’s reflection establishes an encounter between iconic architecture from different epochs, a strategy that the artist employs in order to construct a new, ambivalent, and psychologically charged space. In so doing, the painting includes the people peering down into the pool and opens up for reflections on several levels.