Digital art meets opera: Maria Natalie Skjeset's 'Etterklang' at the Flagstad Festival

The exhibition entitled "Etterklang" by Maria Natalie Skjeset opens in Gallery EKG on Saturday 8 June at 1 p.m. The exhibition is part of this year's Flagstad Festival program and has its last day on Saturday 6 July.

The case shows motifs inspired by opera and Kirsten Flagstad's world, in addition to her dreamscapes, all based on her own photographs. In the exhibition you will find, among other things, portraits of Flagstad, the Oslo Opera House, water lilies and sunflower fields, as well as views of Mjøsa. Everything related to Flagstad, opera and Hamar.

The technique is photo-based digital graphics, a graphics-related expression produced through fully digital processes. The prints are available in small editions, and a single image can consist of dozens of photographs that the artist processes digitally so that the photographic starting point slips into a painterly expression. The pictures can easily be described as poetic mood pictures.

Three of the images are based on portrait photographs of Kirsten Flagstad, used with permission from the Kirsten Flagstad Museum. The artist has chosen character photos of Kirsten Flagstad as Elsa from "Lohengrin" and Brünnhilde from "Valkyrie", in addition to a private photo of Kirsten Flagstad with a child in her arms, to show several sides of the human Kirsten Flagstad. She loved music and at the same time she was very homely. These three motifs only exist in one copy each.

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Maria Natalie Skjeset (born 1990 in Bærum) lives in Hamar and has a studio at Disen Kulturveksttun. She mainly works with photo-based digital graphics, but also with painting. She has a bachelor's degree in virtual art and design (2013) from Hedmark University College, and has studies and courses in art history, history of ideas as well as graphic design, photography and graphics. Since 2014, she has had several solo and collective exhibitions. In 2017, she received Stange municipality's artist grant. Her works have been purchased by, among others, Sykehuset Innlandet, Innlandet county council, Stange municipality and the Art Association Ved Norsk Tipping. She is a member of Norske Biledkunstnere, Biledkunstnerne Innlandet, Forbundet Frie Fotografer and Grafill.