Scan Magazine | Artist of the Month | Norway
Holter takes inspiration from nature and is just as fascinated by grand mountains as she is by tiny insects. Photo: Gro Mukta Holter.
Artist of the Month, Norway
A curious artist’s journey to self-awareness Norwegian artist Gro Mukta Holter often wakes up with colourful motifs on her mind, and quickly rushes to her showroom in Oslo to get them out on paper or canvas. There, she temporarily loses all sense of time and space as she diligently works on her next piece of art. By Line Elise Scanevik
Holter was adopted from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and came to Nøttøry just outside of Tønsberg in Norway in 1977 when she was just 11 months old, which she believes helped shape her work as an artist in several ways. “I had a wonderful and creative childhood with both my parents and my sister, who was adopted from Korea,” Holter explains. “Everything we did at 94 | Issue 102 | July 2017
home was handcrafted – my father was always making things and my mother sewed, so being creative and concerned with quality is something that comes from within.” Holter also feels that her background of being adopted is relevant to her artwork in terms of curiosity and the art of pondering where people are going in life. “I
work with the existential questions in life – the coincidences of why we are the people we are and how we become who we are,” she explains. “I moved away from home at a young age to attend art school, as I featured in my first exhibition at the age of 14, and suddenly I became curious of where I came from. Strangers wondered where I was from and why I looked the way I did but had a Norwegian name – and this opened up a lot of questions for me, questions that I decided to delve right into and examine.” With a Master of Arts from Oslo National Academy of Arts, Holter has also been nominated for and won several awards,