Torbjørn Rødland

Torbjørn Rødland
FENCE STUDIES / WORDLESS

august 26 - october 21, 2017

GLENTEVEJ 49, 2400 COPENHAGEN

Nils Stærk is proud to present Torbjørn Rødland's fifth solo show at the gallery since 2001.

The exhibition comprises two distinct series. Fence Studies is a series of six small works, while Wordless consists of five larger photographs, each showing a human head held by a pair of older hands. The relationships between the persons touching and the persons touched are unclear. The people in Wordless are backlit, creating glowing silhouettes, separating the subject from the background and inducing a sense of impending transformation. Equally characteristic of Rødland's photography as the lighting is the tactile combination of surfaces. Viewed against younger faces, the hands become landscapes of skin, sinews, liver spots and wrinkles.

In Fence Studies, different materials are likewise experienced through their combination. A section of fence connects with a striped canvas bag and flowers; a thicket and a pile of blocks and bricks. The internal tensions of the works are heightened by the relationships between individual photographs. Plasticity and unity are recurrent themes in Rødland's work. The bizarre pliability of the world and of the medium of photography can also be said to be at the heart of this exhibition.

In recent years, Rødland's work has notably been shown at the Henie-Onstad Art Center in Oslo, Manifesta 11 in Zurich and the 9th Berlin Biennale. He was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's series of public installations in New York, and his photograph Baby was on the cover of the September 2015 issue of Artforum. This fall, Rødland will have solo shows at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London (29 Sept.) and at C/O Berlin (9 Dec.).
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Works
Artist Biography
Photo: Emma Jenkinson

Torbjørn Rødland

Born in Stavanger, NO, 1970
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US and Oslo, NO

Torbjørn Rødland’s photographs are produced through film-based cameras and chemical processing. His self-aware and often uncanny photographs, films, and books are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. They take on existing visual forms and genres from still lives to portraits to landscapes, but without the research tone of first-wave conceptual art or the ironic commentary of the subsequent Pictures Generation. In his work, Rødland attempts to seize and integrate truth, rather than deconstruct it, reflecting his inclination to delve into the problematic aspects of contemporary photography and the history of art. He probes popular visual languages in search of both spiritual and perverse qualities, aiming to prolong our engagement with both still and moving images. His works do not offer quick readings; instead, they invite us to explore the layered nature of each image, encouraging personal interpretations based on our cultural, political, and personal contexts.

Inserting his work in a wide array of contexts Rødland’s pieces can be found in art magazines, like Middle Plane and Numéro Berlin, and in the public sphear, like his large-scale installation on the side of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. His work has also been the topic of traditional solo presentations at art institutions such as Serpentine, London; Fondazione Prada, Milan; MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; KIASMA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; The Contemporary Austin, Texas; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Kunsthal Stavanger, Stavanger; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima; and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art.

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