Randi Nygård:
Isbreen pustar mens vi leitar etter den arktiske tåka

Her collages are cut-outs from photographs, books or magazines, and hidden behind mirrors, so that parts of landscapes, history, time, places, and humans meet in a mixture of figuration and abstraction.

In her series of sculptural books the book pages, that were previously separated, are folded out and into each other to create new complex connections and images. In her mirror sculptures, the spectator is placed into the void following natural disasters, endangered plants, and patterns of time.

In her frottage drawings, images are evoked between our languages and the objects, and between the properties and expressions of the materials. The artist has, amongst other things, been rubbing over the covers of well-worn books, and traced lines in people’s foreheads. She has also been on the glacier Folgefonna to produce large frottages where carbon meets ice.

In this exhibition, Randi Nygård is also looking into the linguistic and visual connection between similar words, like economy and ecology, plants and planets, and plastic and plankton.

Nygård has been inspired by the fact that glaciers are breathing and biological life is falling from the sky, and the possibility that time is perhaps not a constant and fundamental structure that is passing, but something that arises between things. The Glacier is Breathing while We are Looking for the Arctic Haze takes place in the intersection between the physical world and images, the flat and the spacious, the figurative and the abstract, the scientific and the poetic, the political and the formal, and presents a desire to view the world more openly but also coherently.

Randi Nygård (b. 1977) lives and works in Oslo and Berlin. She studied at Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2005) and Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway (2006). In 2014, she received a five-year work grant for artists from the Norwegian government.

The exhibition is supported by Statens Utstillingsstipend, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, the Arts Council Norway, and Ingrid Lindbäck Langaard’s Foundation. In 2016, Nygård was also awarded the BKH Production Grant.

The artist would like to thank Karolin Tampere, Lisa Holmgren, Folgefonni Breførarlag, Marita Kråkevik Nygård, Anna Aakre Kråkevik, Torbjørn Sørensen, Oskar Aglert, Munan Øvrelid, Sigmund Skard, Helene Kjær Bremseth, Jack Kohler at the Norwegian Polar Institute, Klemens Weisleitner at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Hagen Telg at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA, and Tara Ivanochko and David Cassis at Phyto'pedia – The Phytoplankton Encyclopedia Project University of British Columbia (www.eoas.ubc.ca/research/phytoplankton/) for pictures of plankton, and Nikolaj Scharff and Dimitar S. Dimitrov, University of Copenhagen and University of Oslo, for the use of pictures of Saintpaulia in its natural habitat.