With Grass Under The Feet, Women in the North
With Grass Under the Feet—Kajsa Zetterquist In Fokus
With Grass Under the Feet—Kajsa Zetterquist in Focus presents a dozen works by the eighty nine-year-old painter who has lived in the roadless land of Saltfjellet in northern Norway since 1967. The exhibition presents approximately one work per decade, beginning in the 1950s when she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. From there, we can trace her expressive idiom—from the Informalist school to the sensitive drawings of the 2020s. In addition to the works, the exhibition focuses on her unique life in the mountains with her artist husband Per Adde (1924–2020).
Artist Ingela Johansson has created a video portrait of Zetterquist specifically for the exhibition, highlighting various aspects of her work—including her advocacy for the environment and Sámi rights, as well as her role in establishing an infrastructure for contemporary art in Northern Norway. Her efforts in founding the art school in Gávvalváhki/Kabelvåg, the North Norwegian Art Museum in Romsa/Tromsø, and the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city are of lasting significance. Two new texts, by artist and writer Ilmira Boloty an and curator Olga Shirokostup, respectively, address Zetterquist and Adde’s friendship with Soviet painter Yuri Reshkin and how boundless solidarity has permeated their lives and work. The texts are presented in a separate publication.
The possibilities of painting—color, line, volume, and the interplay between surface and depth—are all central to the discipline and medium, collectively underscoring the value of sensory experience. The gaze, its wandering between the diff erent parts of the picture, is of central importance. Aft er studying at the Konstfack School and the private Signe Barth School of Painting, Zetterquist was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1957, where—under the influence of professors such as Ragnar Sandberg, Lennart Rodhe, Bror Hjort, and Bror Marklund—she developed an independent artistic practice with a distinct and personal expression. Since the late 1960s, her paintings have taken shape in her studio on Saltfjellet, surrounded by the magical light and suggestive darkness of the northern latitudes.
The exhibition is part of Women in the North, one of Kin’s three thematic threads that will weave through the museum’s activities over the next several years. The thematic threads are a way of using art as a basis to hold on to topics and issues over a longer period of time and thus create a context for ongoing dialogue on current issues. The thematic thread Women in the North is based on an expressed need to highlight the lives and deeds of women in the north.
With Grass Under the Feet—Kajsa Zetterquist in Focus is organized in collaboration with the Adde Zett erquist Art Gallery. It will also be included in Zetterquist’s retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Spring 2026, which will later be shown at Adde Zetterquist kunstgalleri.
Maria Lind, director at Kin Museum of Contemporary Art
