Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s Nordic exhibition on climate change has Group of Seven link

The current exhibition of Nordic art at the renovated and renamed Buffalo AKG Art Museum includes the giant blade of a wind turbine. Danish artist Lea Porsager has dismantled the decommissioned blade and placed five sections on the gallery floor. The discarded pieces sit there emphatically, like some powerful abstract sculpture, questioning our commitment to environmentalism.

This art about our relationship with nature may seem utterly different from the charming Group of Seven landscapes that hang in Canadian galleries just on the other side of the border, but there is actually a long historical link between classic Canadian painting and the contemporary work about climate change now showing in Buffalo.

In 1912, what was then the Albright Art Gallery organized a show devoted to Scandinavian art, an exhibition that proved hugely influential in North America where landscape painting lagged decades behind Europe. In January, 1913, Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald, who would form the Group of Seven after the First World War, travelled to Buffalo from Toronto by train and took in the show. What they saw – Scandinavian artists applying modernist principles to a northern landscape – confirmed their belief they needed to paint Canada in a new way. The Buffalo show is often cited as the fulcrum on which their art tipped toward the spiritual and nationalist landscape painting it would become.

“It’s something that’s very much part of our history, a landmark exhibition,” said Helga Christoffersen, the AKG’s curator for its new Nordic art and culture initiative. “It was the first time that many artists from the Nordic region had ever shown work in the U.S.”

A century later, what was by now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, was in desperate need of renovation and expansion. The modernist wing that had been added to its classical pavilion in 1962 (along with the name of Seymour Knox, the philanthropist who donated the latest abstract art in the 1950s and 1960s) was cramped and aging badly. Plans for a new building were finalized in 2016, cemented with a US$52.5-million commitment from the Californian bond trader Jeffrey Gundlach, a native of Buffalo and the source of the G in the new name. The Gundlach building, attached to the original by a glass bridge, opened last June.

Physical expansion was accompanied by curatorial expansion – the institution almost tripled its staff – and the museum, long known for collecting living artists as they produced their work, began to consider where it should focus. Art museums are turning toward geographic areas rather than traditional departmental divisions such as painting, sculpture or photography, and the Nordic countries were an area unrepresented by any other major U.S. museum.

“We’re looking to our own DNA. Who are we? What did we do in the past? The 1912 show was an important historical pillar,” Christoffersen said. “We are continually assessing our collections … and asking which holes are left to fill. There are places to look that weren’t considered when these collections were being built.”

So, if the Guggenheim in New York can have its Asian Art Initiative, Buffalo would claim the Nordic region. For the inaugural show, Christoffersen, a Dane who worked for many years at the New Museum in New York but now lives in Copenhagen, invited 18 artists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden to respond to the new Gundlach building with art about the climate crisis. A heterogenous bunch, they include three Sami artists and Inuuteq Storch, the Kalaaleq photographer from Greenland whose images of Inuit life will feel familiar to Canadians.

Climate change might seem to demand retrenchment or rationing: Christoffersen notes that today’s art museums try to use sea instead of air freight and are considering relaxing their energy-consuming climate controls. Yet, faced with the enormity of the crisis, many of the artists have responded with scale, producing oversized paintings and installations.

The show begins in a double-height lobby outside the temporary exhibition galleries where one whole wall is covered with a massive cotton canvas by the Swedish-Norwegian artist Ragna Bley. It features a swirling storm of shifting colours, partly recognizable as a seascape because a boat is tossed about in this apocalyptic movement. Walk through a curtain into the main space, and you encounter Olof Marsja’s towering all-black flower-people, their giant daisy heads attached to massive robed bodies, guardians in a Sami tradition of reverence to nature. In the next room, there is Porsager’s wind turbine blade.

“If you dive deep into where we are scientifically, we’re in a very bad place that tells you you should sell your car, go vegan and stop travelling at all. How do you believe in images and believe in artistic production at this moment? If we have a list of things we need to cut is artistic practice the first or the last thing that should go?” Christoffersen asks. “It’s a really essential question, and it’s one that these artists are very much grappling with. The work, and also its scale, it’s made with the consciousness of that, yet also the belief that we should produce images. Powerful visual experiences do matter.”

Some of the artists confront the crisis head on – Felipe de Avila Franco, a Brazilian who works in Finland, contributes a doomsday counter marking carbon emissions as they move toward the irreversible one-trillion-ton mark – while others evoke an otherworldly sense of fear or wonder or escape. Sweden’s Sara-Vide Ericson, perhaps the most traditional painter in this group, offers a high view of a lone figure leading a horse through a landscape scarred by mining. It’s rendered in a narrow palette of red and black, the surface so pockmarked that furrows in land might almost be burning flames or bubbling lava.

This is about as close as this exhibition comes to the kind of paintings that Harris and MacDonald would have seen in 1913. The AKG has established an endowment for its Nordic initiative and a 60-year mandate: Expect to hear more from Buffalo about depicting northern landscapes – in the past, present and future.

After the Sun – Forecasts from the North runs to Aug. 12 at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, N.Y.