Marianne Heske

Marianne Heske (b. 1946) is an artist with great international impact and appeal. Heske has a degree from Bergen School of Arts and Crafts, Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Royal College of Art in London and Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She had her debut exhibition at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1973, and since then she has had a number of exhibitions at renowned galleries both at home and abroad. She has been purchased by all the country's largest museums and galleries, as well as a number of international ones, such as the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Shanghai City Art Collection in China and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, as the first Norwegian artist since Edvard Munch.

She has collaborated with artists in countries such as Nepal, China, Zimbabwe and South Africa, yet it was her upbringing in the small and almost isolated village of Tafjord on Sunnmøre that has left the deepest traces in her art.

Marianne Heske has a good foothold in concept art. In 1978, she became the first to receive an audiovisual installation at the Autumn Exhibition. Her most famous concept work is Project Gjerdeløa, a small log shed that created a sensation when Heske dismantled and moved it from Tafjord to the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1980. Today it is considered one of Norway's most iconic works of art.

In Torshovdalen in Oslo is a 10 ton heavy bronze sculpture of a doll's head based on a small figure in cardboard machete Heske found at a market in Paris in 1971. This little doll's head has followed her throughout her career and she has made it in countless variants and materials, and in collaborating across cultures and borders.