Havard Homstvedt: You Will Hardly Know - hardcover

This deluxe exhibition catalogue/artist's book features works from 2002 through 2008 by the Norwegian artist Havard Homstvedt. Essayist Trinie Dalton describes these haunting paintings and sculptural works as intimate, painterly, sensual and insular. "Come closer to this painted linen, stretched taut to provide views of every intimate dent and hump in the artwork's surface. Intimacy lives in the texture of these images constructed like weavings. On a microscopic level of up-close brushstroke examination, painterly gestures overlap, cross and knot around each other like yarn, string, burlap, twine and other fibrous lines, exposing private histories of the people the brushwork both beckons to and hides. These paintings' citizens hide behind colorful screens they've apparently laced together. Like spiders nesting in their own meticulous webs, characters reveal subdued, but crafty, pasts. Some figures venture out, in brave familiar groups, but they'll never look directly at you. Their lack of eye contact isn't a personal affront, rather a signal they're content to dwell in warm tapestries of oil paint."