Selected works: april

Artworks
4/1/2023

This month we highlight artists who work with ceramics, both with and without glazing.

Nellie Jonsson (b. 1992, Umeå, Sweden) is a Swedish emerging artist primarily working with ceramic sculpture and installations. She graduated from the Oslo Academy of the Arts with a BFA (2016-2019) and an MFA (2019-2021) in material-based art with a focus on ceramics.

Jonsson's figurative work communicates with an everyday tone, at the same time as unexpected compositions and elements leave a distinctive mark on the playful expression. By immortalizing common objects in clay, Jonsson throws references to consumer culture and everyday life, capturing memories around objects in our lives that we usually don’t reflect on. Her works present a presence – an embracement of difference and personality, as well as an appreciation towards the fact that memories can be created out of the smallest of things.

Jonsson is acquired by KODE Museum (NO) and the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design (NO).

Erika Stöckel (b. 1989, Kiruna, SE) holds a degree from the Art Academy in Oslo and the Academy of Fine Arts Umeå.

She works mainly with ceramics, and her sculptures give a sense of organic growth in the form of effervescent ceramic forms built layer upon layer. The repressed body is in focus in Stöckel's work. The bulging sculptures act as a representation of the body, in which Stöckel ask questions about bodily self-image; her identity as Sami is an important element in this, and the works illustrate both shame and ownership of one's own body and identity. The question of a normative body and how we turn subject into object through our gaze is a pervasive theme in her practice.

Stöckel has been acquired by Public art agency, Sweden and Gothenburg Art, amongst others.

Andrea Scholze (b. 1988, Oslo) is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (BFA, 2011, MFA, 2016).

Scholze works sculpturally and on installation pieces, primarily using ceramics. Her works are roughly modelled with an expressive, often bleak look. She creates scenographic installations of often dystopian landscapes where her individual sculptures of human-like species often looking more like trolls, golems or yetis, channel emotions and tell stories. She is interested in how both animals and humas exist together in today’s society and themes such as loneliness, existentialism and belonging are apparent in many of her sculptures.

Scholze’s talent has been recognized by the Norwegian establishment and her work has been acquired by the KODE museums in Bergen, the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Trondheim and KORO (Art in Public, Norway).

Ali Shah Gallefoss (b. 1989, Bergen) has a degree in Furniture and Spatial Design from Bergen Academy of Fine Art and Design (2018).

Gallefoss has early established himself as one of Norway's foremost designers and performing craftsmen, and was quickly noticed by well-known Norwegian designers such as Holzweiler and Snøhetta. In 2019, Gallefoss created a sculpture of superfluous scarves and cuts from the stone industry for the Norwegian clothing brand Holzweiler, which was later installed at Dover Street Market in Beijing. In 2020, he was selected to exhibit as part of Norwegian Presence 2020 at Salon Satelite in Milan. The same year he also won Bo Bedre's design award as the year's newcomer. In 2021, he worked with Snøhetta to create Holzweiler's new store in his hometown of Bergen and was later chosen to curate a jewelry exhibition for Oslo Fushion Festival called "Abstract Landscape" where he produced a number of works in stone, bronze, aluminum, glass and textile.

Marthe Elise Stramrud (b. 1984, Kristiansand) lives and works in Oslo. She graduated with an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo in 2018 and a BFA from the Bergen Academy of the Arts in 2011.

Stramrud has a formal background from the visual arts and has long distinguished herself as a photographer, but has in recent years continued her fascination with object and perception to produce some of the most exciting and sought-after ceramic works in Norway. She is interested in the meeting between silhouettes, backgrounds, flatness and form - between art objects and objects of use and how the boundaries between these can be opened and moved

Stramrud is in the collections of Nasjonalmuseet, KORO - Art in Public Norway, KODE Art Museum, Oslo City Council Art Collection and Sørlandet Art Museum.