INGER JOHANNE GRYTTING
(b. 1949)
Inger Johanne Grytting (b. 1949) is a Norwegian-born, New York-based artist whose post minimal drawings and paintings focus on the primal impulse of mark-making. The work is a meditation on what can and can't be controlled in the material, the hand, and the mind. Her artworks are in the collection of The National Museum of Art (Oslo, Norway), Stavanger Kunstmuseum (Stavanger, Norway), KODE (Bergen, Norway), and have been exhibited in New York City, Norway, Denmark, and Japan.
WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC is the exclusive worldwide representative for Inger Johanne Grytting.
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For any inquiries regarding acquisition, artwork prices, or exhibition, please contact the gallery at info@westwoodgallery.com.
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© Inger Johanne Grytting.
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Inger Johanne Grytting, 2022. Photograph by Ruth Mirsky.
Courtesy the artist and Westwood Gallery NYC.
ARTWORK
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Inger Johanne Grytting’s reductive drawings and paintings are born of a singular focus on gestural mark-making. Grytting uses limited media as she creates with an 8B Faber Castell graphite pencil for her abstract drawings and close contrast values of oil paint for her canvases. Her influences include Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Alfred Leslie, Richard Serra, Vija Celmins, Ad Reinhardt, Eva Hesse, her mentor and friend Jan Groth. She also is inspired by the light from her hometown of Svolvær, Lofoten Islands, Norway.
Grytting is interested in the small, unexpected seismic accidents that enter her process, like when a pencil tip breaks and a small white dot enters the picture plane. The main element in her drawings and paintings is the repetitive, horizontal line. She surrounds herself with a set of self-determined limits which create order but still leave room for her intuition to fill her paper or canvas. Although her drawings and paintings both use the element of line, they differentiate in unexpected variables, such as when Grytting’s pencil line changes in intensity on her paper or when her brush doesn’t quite cover the Burnt Sienna underpainting on her canvas. The result is left open to an energy of the moment, a synergy of movement without control of outcome.
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DRAWINGS
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“With an 8B Faber Castell pencil on paper I layer horizontal lines in dense columns and build the drawing by repeating the gesture over and over again. Each time the pencil point breaks, I leave a small, white space. No lines are identical. I’m interested in what I cannot control, the variable strength in my arm, impurities in the paper, the inability to exactly repeat the speed of the gesture. The process is a probing inwards, where motions and insights are translated into graphic expressions.”
- Inger Johanne Grytting
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“My work describes a primal joy in mark making. The more there are of them the more I feel alive.”
- Inger Johanne Grytting
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PAINTINGS
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