This month, we turn our attention to the world of sculpture, an art form that unfolds in three-dimensional expressions and material diversity. Sculptures have a unique ability to engage the viewer from all angles, and through their form, volume, and texture, they create a physical presence that invites interaction and reflection. The modern sculptures we will focus on challenge conventional forms and materials, showcasing a variety of techniques and approaches. Each work is a testament to the creative power and vision that propels sculpture forward, and we invite you to explore the diverse world of sculptures with us.

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 The National Museum (NO), KODE Museum (NO) and the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design (NO).

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, Equinor Art Programme, KORO (Art in Public, Norway) and Oslo Municipality Art Collection.

Kaja Dahl (b.1984, Oslo) has a master's degree in Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship from ECAL in Switzerland and a bachelor's degree in Product and Interior Design from Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. She works with various materials such as raw stone, terracotta, glass and porcelain, and creates sculptures that respond to a desire to enhance the sensual relationship humans have with the natural materials around them. With techniques that cross between craftsmanship and product design, Dahl creates unique and tactile works with a characteristic aesthetic sensibility. Dahl has been based in Oslo since 2019 after a number of years with design-related projects and residencies abroad.

Previous exhibitions include QB Gallery (2022), DOGA, Oslo (2020), Galleri Format (2020), Gallery Sorgenfri (2019), Dubai Art Week, Dubai (2019), New York Design Week, New York (2018) and Rosanna Orlandi , Milan (2018). Dahl is winner of the BoBedre Design Award (2020), Norwegian Young Talent Award (2016), and Materia Newcomer (2016). Dahl's work is part of a number of private and public collections, and has been purchased by, among others, the National Museum.

Kaare Ruud (b. 1993, Gausdal) is educated from the Art Academy in Oslo and Bergen. In his works everyday functional objects are transformed into sculptures with new material characteristics. Giant size tables that make you feel small, a plastic hose with a bronze head moving around the house like a snake and bronze sculptures of living things that are now sealed in its form. With the crossing of material boundaries, common objects are made into something abstract and complex.

Lars Morell (b. 1980, NO) is educated at the Oslo National Academy of Fine Arts.

Over the past few years, Lars Morell has created a complex and diverse body of work consisting of photographs, sculptures, and installations. Morell’s work has always encompassed and questioned the visible/invisible and what seems to be something that it is not. In numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally this iconography has been thoroughly developed, and in his recent works distorted shapes, which now “grow” over the canvas, are constructed from imagery in his previous works – paintings, sculptures and drawings. We see colored constructs that at first glance are reminiscent of branching root systems; we recognize the outlines of chains and hooks – and thus again objects that are used in illusion and deception. Morell develops these works out of figuration and sees them as distorted still lives, as a dilemma between abstraction and representational painting.

Morells works is in numerous private collections as well as the Malmö Art Museum, Sørlandet Art Museum, Equinor Art Programme, KLP and the Hoff Collection.

Liv Tandrevold Eriksen (b. 1976, Oslo) is educated from the KHIO Institute of colour in Oslo.

Perhaps the greatest asset in Tandrevold Eriksen’s arsenal of resources is her exquisite lightness of touch. Her earlier paintings were delicate networks of thinly laid brushstrokes, evoking oily smudge patterns left on well used touchscreens. Since then, the quality of lightness has taken many forms in Eriksen’s images, in strangely atmospheric compositions where visual equilibrium is countered and attained by superimposition and layering. Some of her paintings introduces more physical elements to her layering process. The images are fairly large canvases occupied by amorphous blobs of diluted acrylics onto which fan-like constellations of similarly treated cutouts are attached to the support, either distributed as singularly applied patches or laid out in curvilinear sequences. These hybrid images notably depart from Eriksen’s previous works, inasmuch as the ground’s whiteness is less prominent and the sewn-on patches make for surfaces more textural and cluttered—however, curiously, without shedding the impression of lightness.

Where the graphic qualities of Eriksen’s earlier paintings tended to reveal her artistic background in drawing, the spaces conjured by her new images appear increasingly ambiguous. The multicoloured attachments look perfectly at home on the paintings’ surfaces, yet seem to hover weightlessly over the pictorial ground, like fluttering confetti. This effect of spatial oscillation—resulting from the appliquéd elements being, quite literally, cut from the same cloth as the rest of the composition whilst remaining materially distinct from it—is an eccentric take on the postmodern pictorial idiom which tilts the horizontal planes of illusionistic recession vertically.

Tandrevold Eriksen is in numerous private collections as well as Statens Kunstråd (SE), Norwegian Culture Council (NO), Equinor (NO), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NO) and KLP (NO).

Magnus Pettersen (b.1983, NO) holds a degree from the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen. In Pettersen’s first solo exhibition in the gallery titled ‘Vitality and Self-interest’ a new series of sculptures are presented which transgress the boundary between artworks and functional objects. With a formal approach, Pettersen combines various units of pigmented concrete cast with polychromatic surfaces, with other materials such as wood, steel and aluminum. The question of what arises when design is no longer bound by functionality, but also reaches for artistic aesthetic and ethical freedom, is central in Pettersen’s artistry. The exhibition title is, amongst other things, inspired by the book ’Vibrant Matter (2009) by the philosopher Jane Bennet, which explores man in relation to his surroundings and the vital force inherent in material formations.

Pettersen lives and works in Copenhagen.

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.

Sandra Vaka (b. 1980, Stavanger) holds a degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (MFA), and the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo (BA).

She works primarily with photography, sculpture and installation. Through a conceptual approach to photography, Vaka juxtaposes seemingly incompatible factors such as water and technology, the eternal and the perishable. In particular, she explores how human perception, body and identity evolve in a constantly changing reality and nature. Both humor and seriousness are combined when Vaka explores everyday things that we connect to our body, such as towels, straws and screens, with a nod to desire, consumption and pleasure that characterizes today's consumer society.

Vaka's work is included in a number of public collections, such as Stavanger Art Museum, KORO - Art in public space, Statens Kunstfond (DK) and NOCO - Nordic Contemporary Art Collection (SE). Vaka lives and works in Stavanger and Berlin.

Julia K. Persson (b. 1992, SE) holds an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and a BA from Lund School of Architecture. Her work revolves around large-scale sculptures and installations, mainly made in clay, ceramics and textiles. Through abstract and figurative forms, she explores constructions; in our built environments, but also in our ideas and thoughts. It is often when something goes wrong, breaks or ends that her interest grows and her work begins. By working with clay in its different stages, from wet to fired, Persson explores what the different materialities can hold and express.

Persson has exhibited at Rackstadmuseet and Höganäs Konsthall, and has taken part in several group exhibitions at, amongst others, ROM for kunst og arkitektur, with PYTON at Kunstnerforbundet and London Craft Week.

Morten Jensen Vågen (b. 1987, Haugesund, NO) primarily works with video and sculptures, and is thematically interested in urban environments, popular culture and surveillance. He creates pieces of value in a do-it-yourself manner; a bank note made with almost dried out coffee from a serve yourself coffee machine, a surveillance room disguised as pile of planks or a still life sculpture of a pile of garbage. Many of his works question societal norms of value in a capitalist society.

Jensen Vågen is in included in Oslo Kommunes Kunstsamling
and Haugalandmuseet.