Faro

Galleri Brandstrup is delighted to announce our second solo show with Øyvind Sørfjordmo titled “Faro”. The exhibition will open on Thursday, 28 October at 6pm, and continue through Saturday, 20 November. The body of work presented consists of new paintings that have been created during Sørfjordmo’s artist residency at Nordic Artists’ Center in Dale, in the autumn of 2020, and in his studio in Oslo in the months leading up to the exhibition.

Sørfjordmo’s drawings, paintings and sculptures engage in dialog with one another across their different media, with the joint goal of exploring the limitations within the materials used; resulting in a steady connection across the art works exhibited. He masterly lets the viewer experience his exhibitions as one single installation, while we simultaneously get captured into each one of the individual art works.

Evident in the paintings shown in “Faro” is Sørfjordmo’s thorough exploration of colors, palettes, textures and viscosity. In his use of different media and techniques, the canvas is prepared with glue and gesso, sometimes followed by gouache as a starting point, before applying oil painting, oilsticks, together with turpentine and linseed oil. The artist carefully experiments with the viscosity of the different media applied; how the paint will work in contact with the brush and canvas. In his search for the right color and viscosity, large parts of the canvas is already covered with paint; shapes and compositional play emerge and remain as a shadow in the finished painting. Through the works presented one can get a firm feel of Sørfjordmo’s study of Sean Scully's colour palettes, Steve Messam's inflatable sculptures, Per Kirkeby's and Asger Jorn compositions.

Remarkable to Sørfjordmo’s new paintings are how his subject appear both as a negative and a positive surface to the image portrayed. The negative form that arises around the positive, is a result of the artist attentive “image building”, often working the negatives prior to finding the movement of the positive form in his paintings. Sørfjordmo compares his work on negative and positive imaging to observing a lighthouse at night; seeing the lighthouse from a distance vs. how it is perceived close up. How the light shines through all of the air, weather clouds and sea and signals that there is something there in the dark, a fixed point that you can glimpse in the distance and can set the course towards. If you get right up close you will be able to find an intensely sparkling object.

Øyvind Sørfjordmo graduated from his masters at Kunstakademiet in Oslo in 2018 and exhibited in the group show “Rethinking Media” at Galleri Brandstrup the same year. His first ever solo exhibition at Galleri Brandstrup, titled “Vacation Time”, was a result of a longer stay in Paris at the residency Cité Internationale des arts. He currently lives and works in Oslo.  Sørfjordmo’s work is included in the permanent collection of artworks at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, and has exhibited at Høstutstillingen at Kunstnernes Hus in 2018. He was awarded the Håkon Bleken Scholarship in 2018.