Art in Festningen Kindergarten

Artist: Eva Grøttum. Title: ‘Dyr fra Selbu i Trøndelag og andre eksotiske arter’ 2011. Art consultant: Jostein Kirkerud.
Eva Grøttum has made her mark on the interiors of Festningen Kindergarten, with her integrated artwork on a curved wall between the kitchen and the day room for children aged 3 to 5. A pattern of various palm trees is printed on a shiny, yellow wallpaper; Corian boards adorned with a different type of images, and in contrasting colours, are mounted both high and low on the wall. These images emerge through perforated dots in the boards, depicting various animals, birds and fish in stylised, yet recognisable shapes. In amongst the palm trees, the children will find exotic animals such as monkeys and elephants, and in an instant, they might find themselves in a completely different part of the world than Festningen Kindergarten at Rosenborg.
For a large part of her artistic practice, Grøttum has worked with geometric shapes, order in varied patterns, and ornamentation in a variety of media. Her starting point has often been the circle and the straight line, and her work process often starts on graph paper. From there, ideas and constructions are processed in a computer, drawing on the artist’s evident interest in and disposition for mathematics.
Eva Grøttum grew up in Skorovas, and travelled to Berlin after graduating from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in the 1980s. Since then, she has been based in the German capital, bar a few years in the 1990s, when she had the opportunity to visit India on a bursary from the Indian government. Whilst there, she gained a deep appreciation for the country’s rich architecture and folk art, particularly symbolic ornamentation in the Aina Mahal palace, Gujarat, from which she has continued to draw inspiration – perhaps even when the theme is animals in Selbu.
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