Tone Vigeland

Bio

Tone Vigeland (1938-2024) was one of Norway’s most recognized artists. She received her artistic education from the National College of Art, Craft and Design in Oslo and from the 1970’s and onwards, she was one of the world’s leading studio jewellery artists. Since the mid 1990’s she increasingly worked with sculptures and installations, often times on a monumental scale. She exhibited regularly since the early 1960s and was represented in innumerable arts and crafts expositions internationally.
Her works are held in collections such as the National Museum in Oslo, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. In 2014, Vigeland was the Festival Exhibition Artist at the Bergen International Festival, and in 2017 she was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at Die Neue Sammlung in Munich. In 2022, Vigeland completed an outdoor sculpture for Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, Norway.

Statement

Vigeland’s jewellery and sculpture are closely linked, however, and will always be so, as part of one oeuvre – something she herself also stresses. The evolution that Vigeland has undergone since the middle of the 1990s is in many ways symptomatic of what has happened to the majority of craft artists in Norway and Europe in the same period. Material-based contemporary art operates effortlessly within many different contexts, and in recent years we have seen a renewed interest in handicrafts and a re-evaluation of modernist vocabulary on the contemporary arts scene. Vigeland’s output in recent years is on the one hand in dialogue with these tendencies, and on the other hand a natural extension of decades of accumulated material knowledge and sensitivity to form which is constantly taking new turns in her art – regardless of which categories one chooses to place the works in.