Marte Bjørndal (born 1974) studied painting from 1994 to 1996 in Oslo, and has since had a continuous production of paintings, drawings, poems, text, photography, performance and video. She debuted with a series of expressionist paintings in 2010 in Oslo, and launched the unique, international art project The Art of Goalgetting the same year in Cape Town in South Africa. The Art of Goalgetting is an art project in the tradition of abstract expressionism, and in this project the artist has sought out areas characterized by slums, crime and socio-economic challenges with the aim of creating art as far away from the exclusive sphere of art as possible, and sought to thematize both the existential the themes that recur in her drawings and paintings as well as global features politically and culturally that abolish a traditional idea of east / west, north / south, rich / poor, powerlessness / power. With an anthropological approach, the artist has created four large-format action paintings outdoors
in South Africa, Brazil, Russia (and Norway with the Photo Pig) during the same period as the world’s largest sporting event, the Soccer World Cup has taken place at the destinations, and the paintings have been created through the game of football and local participants. The project also has an ideal goal as she is investigating that art itself activates as a force. The idea of art as an active force connects the project work with the expressive process she works from in the studio with the production of paintings and drawings.
She has worked in South Africa, Brazil, Russia and in December 2019 gave an invited lecture at Yunnan University at theThe Painting Anthropology Conference and Anthropology Painting Exhibitionin Kunming, China where she was introduced by Dr. Sha Feng and Dr. Cheung Chi Pi on the basis of the project work abroad and the exhibition Androgyne Gymnastic City in Oslo 2019. She has introduced people to each other from different disciplines and connected a large international network of people from academia, journalism, art and entrepreneurship on four continents. She has arranged several public talks in connection with exhibitions in which
researchers in art history, sociology, criminology, film, law, and visual anthropology have participated. The project Fotogrisen in front of The Norwegian Parliament in Norway in 2017 marked an important
goal for the artist when she through The Art of Goalgetting wanted to visualize her critique of Norway’s welfare system which are considered the world’s best and therefore form a model for other nations and established the project in a global discourse. However, her daily work is in the studio, and also on the go with her extensive travel experience.She produced a series of drawings in London the autumn of 2014 which she called the Project Description. These drawings led to participation in the group exhibition Manifesto at Mercedes Viegas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2015 where she lived and worked from 2014 to 2016/2017. In December 2019-January 2020, she participated with a large-format work in the exhibition Multidisciplinary Painting at the Yunnan Nationalities
Museum. This was her first museum exhibition. She is invited to China with a purpose of producing a museum exhibition in Ningxia province in China summer 2021 by the researchers Dr. Sha Fend and Dr Cheung Chi Pi who work with visual anthropology and contemporary art at the University of Xiamen. The contact with these scholars and China marks a real manifestation of the vision that began in 2010.
She is today bought into several private art collections in Norway, and has distinguished herself as a distinctive artist known for going her own way with the gut feeling that compass. In the summer of 2018, the TV channel OTR in Russia made a documentary about project work with The Art of Goalgetting in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and she has received media attention in the Nordic region’s largest art magazine KUNST, TV2, NRK, PLNTY, Bush Radio South Africa, Chinese Newspaper Changjiang Daily and in a number of Russian media such as Kommersant. ThePhoto Pigalso gave a speech on live radio in front of The Norwegian Parliament related to the global rise of far right ideas as a consequence of an unfair social policy. Throughout the projects, she has always been interested in discussing whether it is possible to create justice, what power art has, how art can seem like a bodily experience and whether our consciousness is plastic, what is creative power?