The significance of Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) as a central figure in Scandinavian modernism has only recently been acknowledged on an international scale.

Known for her pioneering contributions to the language of tapestry, she transformed a traditional medium into a vehicle for urgent political commentary. Already in the 1930s and during the Second World War, Ryggen addressed Fascism and Nazism with uncompromising clarity, situating her practice at the intersection of artistic innovation and political resistance.

Drawing extensively on primary sources, Ryggen scholar Marit Paasche offers a richly detailed account that interweaves the artist’s biography with broader currents in twentieth-century art. From her modest farm on Norway’s remote coast, working on a homemade loom, Ryggen produced monumental tapestries that responded to world events: Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the internment of her husband in a Nazi camp, the postwar nuclear threat, and the Vietnam War.

Her works, at once visually striking and conceptually rigorous, combine abstraction and figuration in ways that fuse personal candour with social and political urgency. This volume presents a comprehensive selection of her oeuvre and positions Ryggen not as a regional curiosity, but as an artist of global relevance whose practice compels us to reconsider the scope and possibilities of modernism.