Gerd Tinglum’s series ‘Om Arv’ (About Heritage) has an immediate visual character where the use of bright colors, circles and square color fields gives associations to games, various diagrams and systems. Our gaze wanders between the different combinations. In the space between what is experienced as constant and what is experienced as variables, we begin to search for a system, and in the system for meaning. The title ‘Om Arv’ gives us a hint of what this underlying matter might be. Here, the infinite visual variations of heritage that we are all living examples of, or the often more invisible heritage that we carry with us and pass on, are explored. The paths our thoughts can take are long and many, and the experience of the works is transformed from the immediate and purely visual to a search in- and between the forms, in a possible complex biological as well as emotionally charged matter.

With their organic forms locked in concrete, Gullesen’s wall works exist in the landscape between the historical and brutal, but also the poetic and natural. In the surface of the works, the eye plays in the organic forms, colors and the various fragments that come to light, while one can almost feel how cold and smooth the same surface would feel under our fingertips, we can feel the weight of the stone, of concrete, in the body. Each individual square that together makes up Gullesen’s wall sculptures is a cross-section of natural elements such as pieces of stone and slag cast together with concrete in tight frames. The smooth surface with varying organic forms gives associations to biological cross-sections that are placed under the researcher’s microscope. Several stories are cemented together here; the stone as a cut-off from other projects, but also the history of concrete, from its origin as stone but also how it has been used as a building material in architectural history and the Norwegian post-war period. In these buildings, as well as in Gullesen’s work, one can find the beauty in the gray, the sober, in the stone. Thoughts go to how stone and rock have been a part of how people have sought shelter since the dawn of time.