Nicole Eisenman, Destiny Riding Her Bike, 2020. Photo Thomas Widerberg. Astrup Fearnley Collection. — Nicole Eisenman, *Destiny Riding Her Bike*, 2020. Photo Thomas Widerberg. Astrup Fearnley Collection.

One Image by Nina Strand:

There's no place like home

On a painting, a drawing and a photograph.

The large painting Destiny Riding Her Bike by Nicole Eisenman has been on my mind since I saw it at the Astrup Fearnley Museum In Oslo a couple of weeks ago. A woman soars off her bike having crashed into a ladder set up against a tree, toppling a man who is trying to save the small cat that intently watches the chance meeting between the two humans. In the March issue of New Yorker, Eisenman explains the image in the article ‘Every Nicole Eisenman Picture Tells a Story’ by Ian Parker. ‘It’s a romantic painting of two people meeting. One is falling off a ladder, and the other is riding a bicycle into the ladder—and popping off the top of the bicycle. She’s flying through the air. And they kind of have their eyes locked on each other. I think it’s very romantic—a Douglas Sirk film still.’ Eisenman explains that the picture is connected to her recent relationship with the art critic and writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, and that the image became ‘this disaster happening, and a kind of romance inside this disaster’. In these days of isolation, I long to meet new people like this, romance or no romance.

Vanessa Baird, There's no place like home, 2020. — Vanessa Baird, *There's no place like home*, 2020.

Eisenman has mentioned her admiration for the Norwegian artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, to whose project My Struggle Vanessa Baird’s work has been compared. Baird has just published her new book There's no place like home with autobiographical drawings of living with her kids and her mother. Some drawings are accompanied by notes written by her mother about her different needs, reflections and thoughts. When I once interviewed Baird, she told me she called her drawings for short essays, hoping people could get something out of seeing her work. ‘My everyday life is like everyone else's, it's about recognition.’ This book with her mother certainly seems to depict a struggle, to paraphrase Knausgaard. In one drawing, Baird is sweeping a never-ending dirty floor, with several kids around her, while in a corner her frail mother is lying in a bed. On the top she has written: ‘Stuck in genes and affection.’

Another mother and daughter relationship is evoked in the photograph Kiddo by Linn Pedersen, included in her recently opened exhibition Omland at Golsa in Oslo. The image is the imprint left in the snow after her youngest daughter outside their house in Lofoten. It was dark outside, Pedersen tells me, and she was carrying groceries from the car as she walked past this impression her daughter had made in the snow. It reminded Pedersen of a cherub from a Raphael painting mixed with the Michelin man, an astronaut, and craters in the lunar surface. Many of the images in the exhibition are from the north of Norway, where she has moved back with her family after many years in the South. Omland in Norwegian means land surrounding an area, and the exhibition is a kind of rediscovery of her old surroundings, very clearly suggested in two images next to each other, one depicting a mountain and the other a mountain of souvenirs, old business cards, passport photos, notes.

A chance meeting, a daughter taking care of her mother and children, and an imprint of a young child in the snow. All three artists were working with a fulcrum in their own life and family situations, and during these weeks of a new lockdown in Oslo it became for me a triptych almost emblematic of the situation. We just have to make the best of it. And it helps to make or see art.

Linn Pedersen, Kiddo, 2021. — Linn Pedersen, *Kiddo*, 2021.