– Kant was a pioneer for the takeover of feelings in our culture, says Odd Nerdrum, surrounded in his studio by the theatre group which is about to stage The Last Days of Immanuel Kant in Norway for the first time, almost twenty years after the play was published in book form (Immanuel Kants siste dager, 2003).
The play was scheduled to be performed at the National Theatre in Oslo that very same year, but according to Kristofer Hivju, the publication sparked controversy due to Nerdrum’s unacademic portrayal of Kant, and in consequence, the performance was canceled.
A year later, Hivju (as van Meegeren) and Jan Haarstad (as Kant) produced a radio drama based on the play. The stage play was performed for the first time in Malmö, Sweden in 2007.
In 2019, Odd Nerdrum’s daughter, Aftur, decided to take the task into her own hands and stage the performance of The Last Days of Immanuel Kant for the first time in Norway.
– I grew up with this play, she says. – I listened to it over and over and thought to myself: this is fantastic! It doesn’t bore me for a second. Why has this play not been performed before?
The play premieres 28th August at TBS Gallery in Oslo in cooperation with Sivilisasjonen, starring Per Christian Ellefsen as Immanuel Kant, Öde Nerdrum as Han van Meegeren, Fredrik Hermansen as Lampe, Jonathan Chedeville as Adolf Lenke, Aftur Nerdrum as the maid, and Elias Peña Corrall as Principal Knott.
Just like Ebenezer Scrooge, the national romantic philosopher Immanuel Kant is confronted with the sins of the past when Han Van Meegeren’s ghost shows up in his house in the middle of the night.
Suddenly, Kant finds himself in a situation where he is forced to take a stand on his mystical ideas about art and his forbidden, homoerotic longings. An inner conflict between the bourgeois, christian ethics and primal, human impulses are recurring themes throughout the play.
“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” challenges the academic, elite view of the German thinker’s philosophy, whose legacy is still disputed: Was he a champion of reason or the all-destroyer?
Do you want to know how the mind of the greatest classical painter of our time works?Do you wonder what “classical values” actually are?And why melancholy is actually that important to us? Odd Nerdrum and his former student Jan-Ove Tuv sit down for a conversation in the building which is the Nerdrum Museum in the making: The old Pipe House at Agnes Square outside of Stavern.With a philosophical approach to painting, the discussion will move beyond the strokes and attempt to explain the meaning of painting. Join a one hour conversation about: • The importance of Rembrandt’s melancholy• Why storytelling is so important to us• Why “modern” values are destructive for classical painters and the audience. The event will take place September 14th at 17:00 – 18:00. Tickets are now available.
At the annual Autumn Exhibition in Oslo, visitors will soon be able to see Odd Nerdrum’s recent painting entitled “Redemption”, showing a monumental scene of a father rejoicing with his son. The exhibition is Norway’s largest marking of contemporary paintings, sculptures and nonsense, and was held for the first time in 1882 as a radical protest against the established bourgeois dominance in the Christiania Art Society. The exhibition will be on view from the 9th of September through the 15th of October 2023.
11th August is the date set for the opening of Odd Nerdrum’s solo exhibition at the Uljazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCCA) in Warsaw. The exhibition is titled Painter of the North and features many recent paintings. The UCCCA writes in their press release statement that: “Odd Nerdrum has become one of the most accomplished Norwegian painters since Edvard Munch. A defining moment in his early years was seeing Rembrandt’s painting The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm.” Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Filip Kwiatkowski – In Nerdrum’s paintings, Mankind is situated in an abysmal, mythological world beyond what we usually associate with ‘history’, time and space, says Jon Eirik Lundberg, who is curating the exhibition. He calls Nerdrum’s imagery “a completely new world and a language of signs and symbols,” imitating myths and tales. – But this is not some earlier version of mankind; these people are us, Nerdrum’s contemporaries, only stripped of our modern outfits. Time is absent. They are inhibiting ‘an eternal present’. Not post-apocalyptical, not after some global destruction, but rather as we live today in our essence, Lund continues. The exhibition will be on view from 11th August through 10th of December 2023.