Elly Prestegård

Elly Prestegård is living and working in Bergen, Norway. She has her education from Bergen Academy of Art and Design, now University of Bergen, and Slade School of Fine Art, University College of London. From 1990-96 she was a professor and head of the department of visual communication, Bergen academy of Art and Design.

Her works are represented in The National Museum of Art, Oslo, The Norwegian Cultural Council, City of Oslo Art collection, Bergen Art Museum Kode, Collection of University of London

Prestegård has held solo exhibitions in private galleries and art institutions all over Norway; Kunstnerforbundet Oslo, Gallery Norwegian Printmakers Oslo, Bergen Art Society, Hå Gamle Prestegård among others. She has also participated in several curated exhibitions internationally.

By participating in a number of international workshops in USA, Spain, The Netherlands, Finland and Iceland, she has broadened her knowledge regularly. She has been an artist in residence at Zea May Printstudio in Massachusetts, Art Print Residence in Spain, and in 2018 she will spend one month as an artist in residence at Awagami Paper Mill in Tokushima, Japan.

WORK

Printmaking is Prestegård´s artistic platform and involves photography, digital work, drawing, collage and painting. The artist is searching for expressions in the crossroads of figurative and nonfigurative.

Working with digital photography, her approach is still from a printmakers view, building up images layer by layer, like a collage. Most of her works are one of a kind, or very limited editions.

Nothing compares to printmaking when it comes to experimental work, involving materials, sizes, repetition and rhythm. Prestegård´s approach is kind of nomadic. Instead of searching for a safe place to settle, she keeps rambling, ready to explore the environment where the journey takes her. She works on different projects, and each of them require a fresh approach. Some projects are finished within a given time, and others follow her like a shadow, making her realize that she moves in circles.

Prestegård trusts the power of the visual language. As humans have done since the very beginning, she leaves her marks, trigged by a certain question: “what if.” Outside her comfort zone she finds new questions to raise.

Nature has a strong impact on Prestegård. She is inspired by nature, learning from nature, coming to terms with the reality of life, that she herself in fact is nature, and that her life is following the same rules as everything alive.