The exhibition Strategier mot rinnande øyne examines how painting can be expanded through performative strategies. Annika Ström, together with LNM director Randi Thommessen, have brought together seven artists from Norway and Sweden who allow time, movement and the body to be active parts of their painterly expression.

The title of the exhibition points to a sensitivity in both motif and method. The works are charged with quiet movements and slow changes, where the painting does not occur in the brushstroke, but in what happens before, during or after. This applies, for example, to Annika Ström's work Vattenfärg som rinner ner på golvet, in which watercolour drips from hanging paper onto the floor – a work painted in part with gravity and time. Sigmund Skard's performance, Eg treng… is also based on a similar quietness. Here, the artist sits and writes in a notebook, before putting the pen in his breast pocket without its cap. The ink that slowly soaks into the shirt becomes a painting in the absence of his intervention.

Several of the works thematize traces, movement and identity. A K Dolven shows a horizontal work created by her walking over the surface of aluminum with black paint underfoot – a physical record of movement and direction. horizontal painting is propped up by two Hantarex monitors and Vicco’s handwritten school notebooks. Kjetil Berge presents Dawn, a large crocheted textile work made of cotton and polyester, which hangs as a sliding curtain in front of one of the windows, and introduces painterly qualities in a sculptural form. Using wigs, Vibeke Tandberg has made prints of hair, something she has previously done photographically with a scanner and later in the series Beautiful where she has photographed herself with a blonde wig in wild formations. Costumes and masks are again the center of these Wig Paintings. In the ongoing series Watercolours, begun in 2013, Henrik Håkansson partially submerges watercolor paper in various oceans, so that the salt water forms a horizon, and notes the exact time and place on the paper. The painting here becomes a living process, exposed to time and external forces. Johan Thurfjell shows Untitled, a text-based painting. The text appears as a vulnerable layer-by-layer image, where what one tries to forget still shines through. There is an underlying theme of grief in many of these works and reflected in the exhibition title, Strategier mot rinnande øyne (Strategies For Teary Eyes). Grief and desire to hold onto a past moment with an active action

The exhibition opens two days before the 120th anniversary of the dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden. This gives the exhibition an extra symbolic dimension: Artists from both countries meet in a space for joint investigation, where the painting is not just a surface, but an action – and where diplomacy and art merge in a quietly solemn commemoration of a union dissolution that occurred without shots being fired.