Hannah Ryggen: Weaving the World

Hannah Ryggen made tapestries that were often direct reactions to events and conflicts around the world. The exhibition Hannah Ryggen: Weaving the World presents sixteen monumental pictorial tapestries from the years 1926-1958 that explore violence and oppression, but also existential questions as well as love and poetry. Also on display is a self-portrait in oil from 1914.

Hannah Ryggen, née Hanna Jönsson (1894-1970), was born in Malmö and grew up in the part of town called Rönneholm. She added the “h” to the end of her first name while she was a student. Between 1916 and 1922 she studied painting and drawing under the painter Fredrik Krebs in Lund. Following a study trip to Dresden, Ryggen abandoned painting and took up weaving, though she maintained that she continued to paint through her tapestries. According to her own notes, she did not see a single tapestry in Germany, but was instead influenced by the work of Goya, El Greco, and Vermeer. It was at this time she met the Norwegian artist Hans Ryggen, whom she subsequently married. In 1924 she moved to Hans in Ørland on the Trondheimsfjord in Norway. There she was able to control the entire artistic process, using wool from local sheep and coloring her yarns with dye made from plants she gathered in the surrounding landscape. Hannah Ryggen wanted to weave scenes of contemporary society rather than “the forest with deer running about.” She followed closely the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the German occupation of Norway. Her works often portrayed a lone individual in an act of resistance.

– The hands of Hannah Ryggen formed a powerful criticism that was impossible to ignore, and that remains just as compelling today. Simply put, she wove the world into her tapestries, says curator Julia Björnberg.

Ryggen contributed to the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris; in the 1950s there was a comprehensive travelling exhibition of her work in the United States; she had a large solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1962; and in 1964 she represented Norway at the Venice Biennale. On July 22, 2011 Norway was struck by a horrible tragedy: sequential attacks on the government quarter in Oslo and a summer camp on Utøya Island by a far-right terrorist. Some fifty years earlier Ryggen had been commissioned to make a piece for the government building. The result was We Live upon a Star (1958), which was intended to remind the country’s leaders of what was important: love and compassion for our fellow man. Ryggen wanted her work to be displayed in public spaces so they could be viewed by all. This piece was badly damaged in the terrorist attack, including a long tear through it. It has now been restored, but has a visible scar that now further reminds us of the artist’s humanism and her struggle against fascism.

The exhibition Hannah Ryggen: Weaving the World is produced in collaboration with Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, where a more comprehensive version of the exhibition was on view last summer.