Torbjørn Rødland (born 1970) is a Norwegian photographic artist, whose images are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. His 2017

Serpentine Gallery The Serpentine Galleries are two contemporary art galleries in Kensington Gardens, Westminster, Greater London. Recently rebranded to just Serpentine, the organisation is split across Serpentine South, previously known as the Serpentine Galler ...

solo exhibition was titled ''The Touch That Made You'' and travelled to the

Fondazione Prada Fondazione Prada, co-chaired by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli since 1995, is an institution dedicated to contemporary art and culture. From 1993 to 2010, the Fondazione has organised 24 solo shows at its exhibition spaces in Milan, concei ...

in Milan in 2018. His work was shown at the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...

of 1999. An early

retrospective A retrospective (from Latin ', "look back"), generally, is a look back at events that took place, or works that were produced, in the past. As a noun, ''retrospective'' has specific meanings in software development, popular culture, and the arts. ...

was held at the

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is a privately owned contemporary art gallery in Oslo in Norway. It was founded and opened to the public in 1993. The collection's main focus is the American appropriation artists from the 1980s, but it i ...

in Oslo in 2003. Among public collections holding examples of his work are the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

in New York City, the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

in New York City, the

Fonds national d'art contemporain The Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC; National Foundation for Contemporary Art) is a public collection of contemporary art in France. It does not hold exhibitions but acquires and stores works of art that it loans to museums, cultural instit ...

in Paris, the

Stedelijk Museum The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

in Amsterdam, the

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in the Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary ...

, and

Moderna Museet Moderna Museet is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened Moderna Museet Malmö in Malmö. History The museum opened in Stockh ...

in Stockholm.

Background and education

Rødland lives and works in

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. He was born in 1970 in

Stavanger Stavanger, officially the Stavanger Municipality, is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Norway. It is the third largest city and third largest metropolitan area in Norway (through conurbation with neighboring Sandnes) and the ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

. As a teenager, he freelanced for multiple Norwegian newspapers as an editorial cartoonist. Rødland studied Photography at the National College of Art and Design in Bergen (Norway) and cultural studies at the

University of Stavanger The University of Stavanger ( Norwegian: '','' UiS) is a public research university located in Stavanger, Norway. It was established in 2005 when the Stavanger University College received university status. The university is organised in six f ...

Work

Rødland's photographs are produced through film-based cameras and chemical processing. Art historian and critic Ina Blom has reflected in

Artforum ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably ...

on the philosophical and cultural implications of his works: "The strangeness of these images might have triggered other intuitions—perhaps related to the question of what exactly it means to 'be' a photographic image amid a veritable surfeit of new-media technologies, environments, and objects." Wanting to push forward the artistic boundaries of his medium, Rødland has reconceptualized and integrated aesthetic qualities dismissed in postmodern art. Building on work by

The Pictures Generation ''The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984'' was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from ''Pictures'', a 1977 five person group show organ ...

and

Jeff Wall Jeffrey Wall, Order of Canada, OC, Royal Society of Canada, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian photographer. He is artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he h ...

, Rødland's photography represents a surprising revaluation of lyricism and what he calls the sensuality of the photographic moment. Originally known for his portraits in Nordic landscapes, Rødland transcended this potential trope by consistently inventing new lures for viewers of his photographs. An example of these lures is the subtle co-existence of the twisted with the warm normalcy of his figures; as seen in his photograph of a woman's hand with an octopus tentacle creeping through her sleeve and wrapped around her fingers. Also a subtle symbol of

nonduality Nondualism includes a number of philosophical and spiritual traditions that emphasize the absence of fundamental duality or separation in existence. This viewpoint questions the boundaries conventionally imposed between self and other, min ...

, this image is characteristic of Rødland's work. His matter of factness, even in stylized imagery and multiple exposures, is what allows Rødland to straddle both the commonplace and the otherworldly. According to Rødland, "the struggle is to make the image active and relatable; clear but complex. Like our new reality, it has to be layered and open to paranoid interpretation." Or, as curator Bennett Simpson put it in an essay on Rødland, published in 2000: "His images are subjunctive; they operate under the yoke of a doubt, an impacted desire, the possibility of an impossibility." Between 2004 and 2007 Rødland produced six video works. One of these, titled ''132 BPM'', was exhibited solo at

MoMA PS1 MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art institution at 2201 Jackson Avenue in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens in New York City, United States. In addition to its exhibitions, the institution organizes the Sunday Sessions performance series, th ...

(Long Island City) and at the

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art The is an art museum founded in 1989. It is in Hijiyama Park in Hiroshima, Japan. The building was designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa. It was the first public contemporary art museum to open in Japan, and its exhibitions focus on post-1945, c ...

(Hiroshima). In 2018 Rødland produced a new video work, titled ''Between Fork and Ladder'', which appeared in his solo exhibition ''Fifth Honeymoon'' at

Bergen Kunsthall Bergen Kunsthall is a contemporary art museum in Bergen, Norway. Bergen Kunsthall was originally founded in 1838 as Bergens Kunstforening, and is located in an early Functionalism (architecture), functionalist building designed in 1935 by the arc ...

(Bergen). The solo exhibition ''Fifth Honeymoon'' was presented again in 2019 at both Bonniers Konsthall (Sweden) as well as Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki). Rødland's most recent video, ''Elegy for the Silent'', was finished in 2020 and included in a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin titled ''Bible Eye'' in 2021.

Books

*''Fifth Honeymoon'', Sternberg Press / Bergen Kunsthall / Bonniers Konsthall / Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art: Berlin / Bergen / Stockholm / Helsinki, 2018. * ''The Touch That Made You'', Serpentine Galleries / Koenig Books: London, 2017. * ''The Model'', MACK: London, October 2017. * ''Confabulations'', MACK: London, June 2016. * ''Sasquatch Century'', Mousse Publisher / Henie Onstad Art Center: Milano / Oslo, 2015. * ''Vanilla Partner'', MACK: London, October 2012. * ''Andy Capp Variations'', Hassla: New York, 2011. * ''A day in the life of..'', Libraryman: Stockholm, 2009. * ''I Want to Live Innocent'', SteidlMACK: Göttingen, February 2008. * ''White Planet, Black Heart'', SteidlMACK: Göttingen, June 2006.

Background and education

Work

Books

References

Further reading