Cathrine Muryn was born 22 of July 1970 in Jessheim, Norway. She was during ten years connected to the University of Oslo, within the field of Medical Anthropology. Between 1998 and 2001 she was collaborating in a research project related to young women, modernity and HIV/AIDS, in Tanzania. Through the meeting with East African culture and people grew her need to explore artistic expressions, and to work non-conceptual and non-scientific.

 

Parallel to her formal education and work, Cathrine attended private courses in painting and drawing. From 1994 until 2001 taking classes with Eva Kurseth in Oslo, and during spring 2002 attending Metàfora, Tallers D’Art Contemporani in Barcelona. The last six years she has been living and painting in Barcelona and Oslo.



Cathrines paintings are abstract and emotional. They vary from poetical to more expressive ones, where colour and composition are the carrying expressions. None of her pieces are titled, as she suspects any title to inhibit the viewers openness in the meeting with the paintings, and thereby destroy some of the inherent potential in the abstract language.

 

Cathrine paints directly on the canvas without a preconceived idea or concept, and is throughout the process shifting between intuitive feelings, or spontaneity, and more conscious decision making. As a participant observer, in one moment living within  the painting, playful and intuitively, and then in the next moment observing it from outside, with a more cynical focus on composition, light, unity.

 

Her main drive, or motive, is to explore how colours, brushwork and abstract forms together work to communicate feelings or atmospheres. She is fascinated by the process, like a travel. Being in the complexity and chaos of every unfinished canvas. Then with time and several layers of paint, shapes and not-shapes, explore and discover the beauty, order or composition, of that specific piece.