OSLO.- OSL contemporary opened an exhibition of works by Aase Texmon Rygh.

A photograph of the presentation of Aase Texmon Rygh’s sculptures at Documenta in 2012 shows a range of her medium-scale sculptures on a large, low plinth. Like gymnasts hitting a sprung floor, each work is caught in a different stage of energetic exercise – twisting upwards, sideways, diagonally, horizontally or around – in patterns of movement that seem determined by their unique, individual material and textural attributes. There is a sense that Texmon Rygh’s sculpture has been anticipating just such a platform upon which to perform for some time; their vitality demanding a buoyant surface to strike, one that welcomes a rejoinder.

In his 1969 book Norwegian Sculpture, Øistein Parmann included Aase Texmon Rygh among a group of artists he defined as an ‘in-between generation’ of sculptors.[1] Her embrace of non-figurative forms in the years immediately after the Second World War was evidently premature for majority taste in Norway at the time, while her persistent interest in formal or material concerns was considered out of step with the broader move towards conceptual art in the 1960s. Parmann characterises Texmon Rygh’s work as variously ‘decorative’, ‘ornamental’, and ‘smooth’.[2]

The designation of her sculpture as ‘smooth’ is telling in more ways than one. From the early Piruett series to the much later elegant looping forms of the Kontur series (2009) the flowing movement in Texmon Rygh’s work is frequently ‘smooth’, as are the surfaces of her carved wooden pieces such as Stor trepike / Girl (1953). From a contemporary perspective, we might also understand the quality of ‘smoothness’ in her work as pertaining to the way in which, historically, it slipped past the attention of critics and audiences. A ‘smooth’ sculpture by a member of an ‘in-between’ generation can easily fall through the gaps, after all...

Texmon Rygh’s hard-won public commissions from the late 1960s onwards, like those of many of her international modernist peers, can become easily disregarded against the variegated and ever-changing backdrops of architecture and nature over time.[3] The fate of many post-war abstractionists was, as a result, a visible invisibility.[4] What is needed to counter this dispersal of perception, or of meaning, is a taut surface from which the materials and forms of her sculpture can take flight.

In fact, this is something Texmon Rygh herself established from the very beginning of her career. As reported in the Morgenbladet newspaper on the occasion of her first solo exhibition in 1952, at the Galleri Moderne Kunst in Oslo Texmon Rygh’s sculpture was presented against ‘strong black fabric’ – as in the accompanying image shows – a stylish contrast against which the energy of Texmon Rygh’s early works could bounce.[5]

Many of the bases upon which her works from the 1960s sit are equally intentional. Made from lengths of cut timber and assembled into block bases, the grain of the wood creates its own pattern and provides a contrast to the bronze. The pitted surfaces of the tilted and combining circles of the Duo series from 1968, for example, were all positioned on this sort of base – a way for Texmon Rygh to stage-manage the foundation against which her work would be considered.

A later instance of the desire to manifest a specific context for her work is her photomontage Katedral (1983) which imagines a sculpture of two gracefully bending, monumental arches in an otherwise undeveloped landscape.[6] Understanding sculpture in relation to its surrounds need not be seen as ‘decorative’ or ‘ornamental’ in a pejorative sense, as the recent large-scale exhibitions of the work of Texmon Rygh’s international peers such as Barbara Hepworth and Isamu Noguchi testify.[7]

One possible reading of Texmon Rygh’s particular impulse to create both the artwork and its ‘stage’ might be as a mitigation of her personal experience of working without a substantial critical context or audience for much of her career. As she described in an interview, ‘I found it best to continue in the isolation which had in a way been imposed on me’. In fact, she decided, ‘it suited my temperament’.[8] In lieu of a reliable and attentive external context for her sculpture, perhaps, we can observe a tendency in much of Texmon Rygh’s work for the forms within each piece to lean together to some degree – the different masses holding each other in counterpoint – as in the folding structures of Stabile I (1971) or the grouped parts that comprise Langlangrekke (1974). In this way Texmon Rygh’s sculpture provides its own context, its own internal logic or ‘bounce’.

his internal energy is similarly a feature of Texmon Rygh’s striking monochrome wall reliefs, as in the neatly interlocking geometry of Relief 7 (1977-1996), or the coiling forms of Relief 8 (1977-1996). The allure of these objects is their defiant independence, combining both sculpture and surface, and thus emphasising the enclosed dynamism within the work, what I have here described as ‘bounce’.

I like to think that we might also detect a note of humorous insubordination in their necessarily self-contained spirit, which echoes Texmon Rygh’s above statement. In the parallel, undulating lines of Relieffer (1995) for example, there is an insouciant farewell ‘kiss’ to the passerby and their previously fleeting attention. Like many women of her generation, Texmon Rygh had to wait for the wider platforms and recognition that her inclusion in events such as Documenta signalled.[9] In examining the latitude of her sculpture from different periods, however, I think it is clear that their appeal does in no way rely upon this acknowledgement, but is obvious for those willing to engage. — Dr Inga Fraser, Senior Curator, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, January 2025


[1] Øistein Parmann, Norwegian Sculpture/ Norwegische Skulptur (Oslo: Dreyers, 1969), p. 45.

[2] Ibid., p. 46.

[3] Or they wind up in pressing need of conservation. The photographer Simon Phipps documents many such works in his book, Concrete Poetry: Post-War Modernist Public Art (September Publishing, 2018).

[4] Demonstrating this fate, one photograph of one of Texmon Rygh’s möbius works (Möbius dobbel, bronze, 1990) was used in the published compulsory curriculum for Norway – not in relation to sculpture or art, but as a general evocation of mathematical principles within the mathematics section of the book. The Curriculum for the 10-Year Compulsory School in Norway (The Royal Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs, 1999), p. 183.

[5] ‘Hun stiller ut 13 skulpturer avtre, av gips mot sort stoff, og statuette av bronze og terrakotta...’ Morgenbladet, 12 November 1952. Reproduced in Randi Godø (ed.) Aase Texmon Rygh: Modernism Forever! (Oslo: Nasjonalmuseet, 2014), p. 13.

[6] Katedral is reproduced in Øivind Storm Bjerke, Aase Texmon Rygh (Oslo: Grøndahl og Dreyers, 1992), p. 104 and can also be glimpsed in a photograph of the plaster for Tema X (1991) in the artist’s studio, also published in the same book, p. 116.

[7] The 2015 exhibition, Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World at Tate Britain and touring, specifically focused on the sculptures in their changing contexts of the artist’s studio, the Cornish landscape, and the modernist pavilion designed by Gerrit Rietveld at the Kröller-Müller Museum. The 2021-22 exhibition, Noguchi, jointly organised and curated by Barbican Centre (London), Museum Ludwig (Cologne) and Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern), in partnership with LaM - Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut, featured the artist’s design work alongside his sculpture.

[8] From an interview in Asker og Bærum Budstikke, 16 April 1999.

[9] For further discussion, see Sigrun Åsebø, ‘Aase Texmon Rygh – a woman pioneer or simply a pioneer?’ in Randi Godø (ed.) Aase Texmon Rygh: Modernism Forever! (Oslo: Nasjonalmuseet, 2014).