JENNY UELAND & VAAR BOTHNER

Duo Exhibition

‘SIRKULÆRE TANKER, ABSTRAKTE FORMER’, 2022

September 22 - October 09, 2022

SORGENFRI is proud to present the duo exhibition, "Sirkulære tanker, abstrakte former", by Jenny Ueland and Vaar Bothner. Ueland and Bothner aims to explore and convey the possibilities that lie in the upcycling of building materials through art. In this way, they want to increase knowledge, awareness and commitment to a more sustainable use of resources in the construction industry.

Sculptural objects and structures built up of various recycled building materials will showcase new forms and associations, and at the same time convey the origin of the materials being used - coming from a construction site in Oslo. Through sculptural objects they aim to find beauty in materials that most people would consider a waste product, all the while exploring our understanding of art. Further asking the question - how and when does an object become art?

‘The sculptural objects will not only consist of waste materials, but also be given their shapes based on the materials available at the construction sites. In this way, the objects will display what is possible to achieve with materials that many otherwise consider to be rubbish.’ – Jenny Ueland

Both artists, having worked as architects for several years, have a great commitment to a moresustainable use of materials in the construction industry. Through this project they seek to convey this knowledge by exploring the boundary between sculptural objects, space and landscapes. The audience will be invited to move between and around the objects, to constantly discover new aspects of them.

In this way, they wish to capture the visitor's attention and commitment, and pass on the object's history as a building material, and the opportunities that lie in reusing this resource for the future. "Sirkulære tanker, abstrakte former" will present six installations that will include a single, or several objects combined. By creating peculiar shapes and associations out of broken tiles, cracked concrete or used wood put together in new ways, the installations will reveal a process of exploration and close collaboration between the two artists. Concrete, marble and tiles will be common materials.

This is Ueland and Bothner ́s first exhibition together.

TINE ISACHSEN

VR SHOW: ‘You are not here’, 2022

13.10.2022 - 23.10.2022

We are proud to announce the first VR experience and NFT collection by famed illustration artist, Tine Isachsen.

The multidisciplinary artist’s first foray into digital art,includes a NFTdropof 12original pieces, showing parallel series of NFTs, physical polaroid, prints and a VR experience.

Known for her vibrant, dreamy artworks, which include everything from small sketches to large scale paintings, the Oslo based artist is now making an appearance on the digital art scene with a VR set up in close collaboration with 3D artist Magnus Grønningen.

Tine Isachsen explains; -‘As an artist I like to embrace new media through which I can present and see my work, what happens when you use VR as a showroom for art, thinking outside the white cube? I’m fascinated by the psychological aspect of being inside a VR-room, it’s like a double reality. It challenges our understanding of who, what, and where we are.’

The exhibition ‘You are not here’ will be held in the gallery space in SORGENFRI, where the VR experience will be based upon the actual architecture of the space. Giving a surreal and paradox sense of thegallery room.The workscreateanew connection between existing elements, a statement on the digital art revolution.

‘I like the idea of Escapism in today’s world full of injustice, negative energy, and distress. Escapism is not the same as avoidance. I’m thinking of something hopeful and playful, like Alice in Wonderland. She didn’t leave the real world, but she created her own, parallel to the one she already knew.’

‘‘You are not here’ refers to the same idea. I have always been creating new worlds inside my head. VR and NFTs, to me, are a way I can invite viewers into this created universe and connect with an audience I may not be able to reach otherwise.’

Isachsen has, as often seen in her previous work, her starting point in surrealism.

- ‘The surreal brings a certain weightlessness to the harsh reality of everyday life by tapping into an escapist mindset.’ Tine Isachsen

Her light and illustrative pencil mixed with a darker and more absurd touch of paint and layering combined with the VR, enhance this idea.

Isachsen’s NFT drop includes 12 digitals, 30 Polaroid installations and 4 bigger prints. A selection of the artworks from the exhibition will be presented online at SORGENFRI.STORE in the following days after the show.

TORA FROGNER & FRIDA MAUREEN HULTBERG

Duo exhibition: ‘Alt som vokser faller’, 2021

02.06.2022 - 26.06.2022

Tora Frogner (sculpture) and Frida Maureen Hultberg (drawing) are examining people's relationship to places, materials, landscapes and objects. The works explore in different ways how the seemingly well-known, solid and recognizable around us, is always already in dissolution and change. Furthermore, how the world as we know it is characterized by preconceptions, memories, and myths.

"Alt som vokser faller" presents more than 30 works that reveal a very close collaboration between the two artists. By sending each other sketches, pictures and memories as part of an ongoing conversation the last two years, Hultberg and Frogner have developed an almost collective subconsciousness, all of which feature the duo's unique pictorial vocabulary of a dreamy world beyond or parallel to ours. They have produced a significant body of work that embraces dreams and fantasies interlacing with reality. The interest in nature's force, the cultivation of the beyond and the exploration of reality, versus the supernatural—all rooted in Romanticism—are crucial features in this exhibition. Transforming the natural and organic into new places and understandings, finding elements of observed reality to interfere with strange and wondrous things. The two artists demonstrate the possibility of observation and imagination, perception and hallucination, scrutiny and thought. The viewer is invited to see beyond nature, beyond reality, beyond the visible.

‘We ask questions about time and what change and movement really is. How do we as living organisms affect the matter around us and how are we physically and mentally in and around it?’ – Tora Frogner.

Hultberg shows drawings in oil pastel and charcoal. In her richly textured paintings she turns to spectacular colors, using the bright and luminous hues of pastels, and the bright and strong touches of magenta, orange, yellow, and blues, all combined with dramatically shaded charcoal horizons.

Frogner shows sculptures in stoneware. The materials are simple and organic, and she uses subtle shifts in color, ecru and browns melting together, to suggest sand and earth. Through the voluptuous shapes of her objects, Frogner makes her own understanding of still life, translating vivid and natural forms into nature's almost supernatural beings.

Like all of the works shown in this exhibition, they link observation with imagination.

In addition to exploring the aesthetic of dreams through visualization of eerie atmospheres and subjects that only live in the mind, or somewhere unknown —the exhibition illuminates Hultberg and Frogner’s links and knowledge to architecture and landscape, theater, philosophy, photography, film and visual arts. Within a cultural significance, this further highlights the two artists’ role and impact on the future: where form, material, design, space, ambience, here and beyond, all blend together as the proposed future way of thinking.

SPY GARDEN

Group Exhibition

01.04.2022 - 01.06.2022

An exhibition and Pop-Up showing a curated selection of sunglasses. The show divides between smaller productions by Norwegian brands and vintage archival pieces hand picked by SORGENFRI, focusing on the area Y2K. In addition to the sunglasses inspirational and related art pieces by Norwegian artists are complimenting the collection.

The exhibition will continue online after the show finishes in June 6th, as part of the ‘Collectibles’ page at sorgenfri.store

IGNAT WIIG

Solo exhibition: ‘Untitled Portraits, 2019-2022

24.04.2022 - 30.04.2022

Following longer stays in New York and Paris, Wiig has spent the last three years probing the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes, celebrity, gender, and photography. Even though studying photography quite recently, he is becoming one of Oslo’s significant documentarians of youth. He responds to a reportingly conservative, straight forward and wealthy Oslo with both humor, idolism and criticism, appropriating images of people who fascinates him.

Wiig transforms himself, displaying the diversity of human types and stereotypes in his images and with small notes of despair and hopelessness, he hits the nerve of today's society. He often works in series, improvising on themes while he goes. With an ongoing urge to understand beauty, he has in recent years photographed over 100 people representing what he sees as the ‘new wave’, exhibiting in SORGENFRI during the last week of April a selection of these. 

“Searching new faces has always been of great interest to me,” he says. “Everyone I shot came in their own clothes things just happened”.  The series is ongoing, a growing archive of characters; each image becomes a collectible representing time, place, and energy.

‘Untitled Portraits, 2019-2022’ builds on these studies in portraiture, character, and charisma. The photographs almost touch as sense of a still-life picture; the subjects all pose in a calm, focused way: looking straight at you. The pictures feel quiet and loud at the same time. Quiet because of the silent mood, and loud because of the strong, rebellious voices documented.  

DAYDREAMS

Group exhibition

10.02.2022 - 20.02.2022

The collective DAYDREAM consists of three visionary creatives within art, design, and innovation. The exhibition "Daydreams - spaces in between" represents a common free haven for artistic expression and experimentation with themes of dreaming and mind-wandering within physical and digital space.

This daydream plays with elements of Nature, Blockchain technology, and 3D fabrication, intertwined throughout the immersive pastel environment of the exhibition. The three individuals bring forward their different perspectives on life through individual traits of nationality, cultural background, and sexuality. The result is a dreamy world of individuality and collectivism, manifested through an almost carefree mix of media, from microbial ecosystems to physical soundscapes.

Within the exhibition of DAYDREAMS, the vivid complexity of the human condition is put on display. The function of daydreams as heroic quests into glimpses of saturated life is subject to playful scrutiny, artistic translation, and audience participation.

Leon + Øystein = <3

Duo Exhibition, Leon Lindgren and Øystein Rolland

13.01.2022 - 16.01.2022

Lindgren and Rolland have made an imaginary residence, arranging objects made of textile, yarn and clay, in the same manner that they would decorate their home. The attempt is to assemble the most beautiful room, a dream house. A myriad of myths and stories are collected and told through an ensemble of sculptures, wall pieces and crafted pieces. They are playing with the decadence of bygone times and romantic post rave vibes to knock together a fantasy of an emerging future.

ARTIST SUPERMARKED vol.2

Group exhibition

3.12.2021 - 9.01.2022

Repeating last year’s supermarket, opening a pop-up store within the gallery of SORGENFRI, of one-of-a-kind art pieces from up-and-coming and established artists available to buy for cheap.

The customer will be able to bring the art pieces home immediately, buying art in a completely new environment, as part of an everyday shopping experience.

A wide range of works and ideas will be on display, embracing a collection of artifacts relevant to our present time, history, and the future from both new talents and established names. Crossing between various media; sculpture, product design, painting, textile, recycled, worn-out, prototypes, sketches, all objects in the supermarket are unicas or in series of a maximum of five. In addition to a selection of rare, archival, and iconic design objects that fits into SORGENFRI’s sustainable vision will be available to buy.

The supermarket will give customers easy access to original unique art by some of Norway's most interesting and influential creatives. 

Trude Bredholt

Solo exhibition; LAMINA.

4.11-28.11,2021

The show demonstrates Bredholt’s ability to create powerful paintings in widely different scales and her propensity for using bold experimentations, courageously demonstrating an expressive artistic gesture. Working dynamically on several paintings at ones, both on flat laying canvases and canvases hanging on the wall, she uses gravity and movement confronting the possibilities and limitations within the frame. 

Her high-energy paintings are radiate with the vitality, feeling and sweeping emotion we usually experience only in the natural world, she uses colors that work as both decor and aggressor. She is playing with, and remaking the possibilities of, abstraction versa personal expression. Her works oscillate between an unrestrained imagination and her familiarity with, and allusions to, embodying music. 

Bredholt’s works are process oriented and her artistic practice is often seen as spontaneous and hypnotic. She encounters the canvas with a direct and instinctive approach, exploring movement and empty space, using various techniques and materials such as pigments, acrylic and oil. A sense of freedom exudes from the vibrant work of Bredholt where chaotic urbanism is a central part of expressiveness. Her painting incorporates techniques from different genres, such as the aesthetics of color field, fauvism, graffiti, and surrealism, resulting in one singular visual vocabulary. Her canvases capture her physical process and ongoing research of material and methods.

Trude N. Bredholt (Oslo, Norway) lives and works in Bergen where she is currently doing her BA in Fine Arts at The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art – KMD.

HELLE HØEG

Solo exhibition; POTPURRI.

16.10-31.10,2021

The exhibition is embracing different ideas and thoughts by Helle Høeg on how to use and form clay. After being awarded Debut of the year by The Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts in 2018, Oslo-born and based Høeg has the following past years been producing lyrical and tactile objects that merge the sacred and the everyday. A series of 20 composed sculptures are striking with their hypnotizing and ancient inspired forms.

Throughout this exhibition, we see objects used outside of their intended roles, mixing ideas and techniques reinserting them into different contexts, questioning their original shapes and surfaces. Høeg explores the classic and pre-historic ways to handle clay using the coil technique. Further developing her own mosaic ideas and patterns give new meaning to adding and extracting; which has become an important part of the process of each sculpture and her practice.

The sculptures are placed on a low plateau with sharp lighting, illustrating the artist’s captivating way of intertwining storytelling and sculpture within the space of the gallery. Until October 31st.

Helle Hoeg graduated from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Khio) in Oslo. She works mainly with clay as a material focusing the last years on the abstract form in everyday objects. The direct contact she has with the material makes her work an almost bodily experience where the entire object is touched and massaged by her hands. This makes her sculptures a reference and carrier of the human body; with its palm traces and fingerprints.

Ann Kristin Einarsen

Solo exhibition; POTPARTY.

23.9-13.10.2021

The exhibition brings together works made by Einarsen during the pandemic 2019-2021, featuring functional and figurative ceramic objects that draw from joyful and colorful events that have inspired us through the dark times.

Einarsen explores the impact of a sculpture as a functional object, but also the possibilities, functionalities, and abilities within the clay, as these themes resonate across the artist’s multifaceted practice. Her work often constructs series that have emerged from process and memory, and its replications and repetitions build a world of its own. Never far from the earth, nature, and deep respect for the craft, her works emerge as an ongoing dreamy story-telling. Both timeless and specific, this series especially straddles the contemporary, the crafted, and the exuberant. Somewhat affectedly demure in a flirtatious way. 

Highlighting Einarsen’s production over the last two years, the exhibition embraces one long process of nearly 40 sculptural works made of ceramic, stoneware, terracotta, and glaze. Some objects are neatly rendered with the artist’s recognizable details while others timely have changed and developed further alone, before and after burning. Revealing a preoccupation with the persistence and recognition of functional form, functionality is central to Einarsen’s practice, -as in opposition to many other artists.

These beautiful and characteristic artworks in clay investigate the tactile and ergonomic potentials of glaze, further the highly operative theme of self-watering. As a final exercise, the sculptures are placed together in different combinations in SORGENFRI’s space, while working on its collective intention: housing and watering different plants. 

Functional Art / OSLO DESIGN FAIR

+MIKE LAUNDRY ART GARDEN

Group exhibition: City courtyard behind SORGENFRI transformed into an art space, while the inside is covered in vegetation.

1.9-5 - 9.2021

An empty courtyard usually used for litter boxes and bicycles, on the backside of multi- functional space SORGENFRI, has been transformed into a superb art place curated by Michael Laundry Art Garden, -while the normally busy area inside the gallery is covered in vegetation, showcasing functional art objects in collaboration with Oslo Design Fair.

Last year SORGENFRI hosted Oslo Design Fair’s one and only mini exhibition as an alternative to their normal program during the Pandemic. This season the collaboration has moved into more of a joint effort showing off the Norwegian design scene.

New addition to this emerging design week is MLAG, Michael Laundry Art Garden. MLAG is a green-design platform for urban gardening, education and contemporary art based out of Bergen, Norway. Curating artists all over the country, popping up in different outdoors areas, this is MLAG’s first exhibition in Oslo. The mobile, outdoor gallery space will pop up this week in the courtyard behind SORGENFRI.

With this multi-faced collaboration, the aim is to create a feeling of inside outside and vice versa, playing with our ideas and our understanding of a space, it´s environment and its purpose. Further asking questions like if, how and when a design object becomes art; - and who is the one to decide? Explore the work of a total of 27 artists who have brought their artistic work into the realm of functionality / designers who made such remarkable designs that their work has become art.

The courtyard, formerly inaccessible to the public, has been incorporated into the installations that will take place, and becomes a glazed art garden where the honey-colored original wall painting and terracotta brickwork is a fierce backdrop to the art works.

SORGENFRI ARTWEAR x OSLO FUSHION FESTIVAL

2H, 2021. August 24 – August 29, 2021

Opening: August 24, 11 am                                                     

SORGENFRI is pleased to announce the partnership with Oslo Fushion Festival with the group exhibition SORGENFRI ARTWEAR.

As one of three colluding parties during the festival, SORGENFRI will be showcasing new and well-known designers working at the intersection of fashion and art. While highlighting today’s influential voices within slow fashion, the show is pursuing the fact that a garment can also be seen as an object of the arts. 

“We experience that many professionals are not happy with the fashion industry as it is today. Through the next decade the industry is forced to go through a fundamental change, and we urge to bring together the Norwegian, contemporary voices of this development.

The SORGENFRI ARTWEAR exhibition corresponds to this shift by exploring the crossing between art and fashion. Working to achieve a more knowledgeable, nuanced and sustainable industry with a bigger focus on business, ethics and the craft. 

The exhibition will be both an interactive digital viewing room and a physical exhibition in Oslobukta. We are happy to do this together with Oslo Fushion Festival, as we believe that SORGENFRI ARTWEAR will be an important direction for the Norwegian fashion industry in the future.” -Ingrid Bredholt and Vaar Bothner.

 The SORGNEFRI ARTWEAR exhibition will be happening at three places at the same time, all interacting with each other:

Oslobukta, Operagaten 75, 11-17:00 every day

SORGENFRI, Sorgenfrigaten 16, 11-22:00 every day

sorgenfri.store, 24h

«We are incredibly pleased to announce a strong lineup of some of Norway's most exciting design talents, and our creative collaboration with the leading fashion art platforms Oslo Runway, Collective Oslo and Sorgenfri Artwear, and artist Ali Shah Gallefoss. Together we gather some of the finest creative expressions, coming together to contribute to Oslo's international position as a cultural destination,” - Elin Carlsen, CEO of Oslo Fushion Festival.

About Oslo Fushion Festival 

Oslo Fushion Festival is an annual fashion art festival and conference that illuminates intersections between fashion art and culture. The festival is a meeting place for the creative industry and a space where you can experience some of Norway's most exciting design talents. 

SARA SKOGØY

Solo exhibition: ‘Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching - the delicious sound of the people emptying the 1%ers bank accounts while they’re busy colonizing Mars’, 2021

9..8 - 29.8.2021

SORGENFRI is pleased to announce the opening of Sara Skogøy’s first exhibition after receiving “People’s Choice Award” at Høstutstilling 2020. 
Skogøy continues to capture the imagination and raise awareness of our social behaviors. Her work gives you the feeling of ‘a political agenda’ and a sense of challenging status quo through fashion and art. Though fashion has traditionally stayed away from politics, fearful that demonstrating any leaning would alienate people, Skogøy is not afraid of this. She is timely exploring the complex inter-sections of fashion, art, and politics in a playful and sarcastic way. Skogøy is known for creating her own stage to express sexualism and identity, as well as seeing both fashion and art assymbols of capitalism.

She explores the political potential of fashion despite its immutable status as a commodity. The way human (female) bodies are defined by trends and the entanglement of oppression and ex-pression through clothes are great forces within her work. She further plays with satire and inspects contemporary issues within class and status. Though not innately political, these are the brash concepts of Skogøy’s ideas. She makes designs and installations to create spectacles that will both challenge fashion and encourage conversations. She well balances art within fashion and vice versa, seeing art from a theatrical, expressive, and humoristic perspective while looking into the importance of one-of-a-kinds and artistic interaction in the future of fashion.

Three lifelike female figures meet you in this exhibition. They are staged to show that they just robbed a bank. One of them wear a velvet low waisted pant with the inscription “eat the rich”, referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseaus work. Skogøy provides a prompt investigation of under-developed topics within fashion, class and equality; by drawing lines between the French Revolution and the urgently needed fashion uprising of tomorrow.

Victor Nicolai

Solo exhibition; LCOAAS.

23.7 - 08.8.2021

Lost children of an anonymous sailor shot in the south of Norway during a day in Spring, 2020. 

The photographic series visualizes memories of something that could have been, but never happened. The images reflect blurry and dreamy motifs of dolls and flowers, the latter well known to Victor Nicolai’s work. The dolls Nicolai got from an old sailor by the coast of Norway, they were meant as gifts to his children. The children are described as ‘lost’ since they were lost to the sailor who never got to meet them: the story is documented by Nicolai through an old Leica, shot on analog film.

 "I work with moments that never found their place in time", Victor Nicolai says.

Nicolai is often mixing the motifs of classic and beautiful with the shadowy realms of the mind. More frequently he is using psychological undertones to embody an occurring aesthetic to his work manifesting strange and unknown situations. Often immediately seen as playful and romantic, Victor’s photographs reveal the dark an chaotic. But, contrary to popular interpretation where the beautiful is usually hiding the ugly, this is meant to be a contrast and an eye opener; inviting human beings to understand the contradictions imposed on us —as well as the ones that we impose on ourselves. 

www.victornicolai.com

EBBA KRUSE

Solo exhibition; ‘Along the lines’.

17.6 - 18.7.2021

Kruse explores the themes of fragility, failure and societal purpose. Challenging some of our base ideas overwhat it means to have a purpose, specifically within the frame of literature and utility. Are the drawings you see on bleached paper and wood print books? What exactly defines a book if not ink and wood, perhaps it is the abstract idea which draws it together, the talisman of its meaning. The ceramic sculptures in the show are presented as a consequence not of, but because of their failure. They are useful, but not in the usual sense.

Kruses work usually take the form of simple drawings and different structures. Taking inspiration from architecture and the body, she uses different materials to describe states of fragility and vulnerability through pushing the materials boundaries, sometimes making them as thin as possible or cutting them up into different pieces and putting the work back together with the marks and imprints still visible. Kruse searches confront failure, accept it, embrace it and understand it as the most honest expression of my creative process, turning failure into something rewarding.

ARTWEAR ONLINE

Group exhibition

15.2. - 31.3.2020

ARTWEAR: This time as an online viewing room and shop. The designers in question are Norwegian artists working in-between art and fashion. They will offer a selection of their works during the online show at SORGENFRI.STORE. The works on display are all wearable art pieces atelier made in Norway, all which you can buy. The show is curated to reflect the future world of fashion and our emerging ́cultural aesthetics’. With this exhibition SORGENFRI wants to credit the art within fashion and still tell the audience that avant-garde fashion are clothes to be worn. The online room will be open 24/7 working as exhibition and an online shop. ARTWEAR viewing room and shop is set up with a deep respect to the SORGENFRI’s philosophy; to give customers easy access to long-living design products and one- of-a-kind pieces.

SORGENFRI will publish new artist names during the entire show period: SORGENFRI.STORE, available to ship worldwide.

ARTWEAR

Group exhibition

18-21.8.2020

SORGENFRI invited a group of independent Norwegian artists, working in-between art and fashion to make a selection of their prime works to show during artwear.

Since art is a reflection of who we are, further we dress to express a feeling or statement; fashion is an art form.

The works on display are all wearable art pieces. Curated to show that the designers in question fuel the future world of fashion and our ́cultural aesthetics’, but yet make clothes still to be used and loved every day.

The aim is to give an engaging and old school depth, yet progressive way of thinking, to today’s retail and e-commerce. Creating a less expected scene more adapted to each customer’s needs; some garments are one of a kind, some can be bought immediately, and some garments are made upon your order.

Furthermore, the basic elements of fashion reflect the symbols of human existence. With this exhibition SORGENFRI wants to credit the art within fashion and still tell the audience that avant- garde fashion are clothes to be worn.

SISTER SISTER DOUBLE HAPPINESS

Pop-up / Exhibition /

Trude Bredholt and Ingrid Bredholt

31.7-15.8.2020

A 15 days pop-up of ARTWEAR; by Ingrid Bredholt and Trude Bredholt. Presenting a selection of art, fashion and lifestyle products made by the sisters. In collaboration with MARDOU&DEAN.

www.trudebredholt.com

www.mardouanddean.com

RUE BOTANICS

Launch

7.5.2020

INTRDOUCING HYDRATE ELIXIR and Sooth softening serum.

Each formulation is designed in excellence with hand-picked ingredients that show results. Creating sophisticated and effortless products that are ethically and sustainably produced, Made by hand in Norway. With years of dedication and research in developing natural beauty, Dunn is a vanguard in couture skincare.

RUE is a sustainable skincare brand made by incorporating wild harvested, organically grown, 100% plant-based ingredients in theIR formulations. all products are produced in small batches and are as fresh as possible. 

Kristina Dunn, founder and formulator of RUE, is two-time award winning graduate from Formula Botanica with diplomas in Organic Skincare Formulation, Organic Cosmetic Science, Anti-Aging Skincare, and Beauty Business Management.

www.ruebotanics.com