Image: Blaafarveværket, Åmot
‘I oss,’ an exhibition by Gunvor Nervold Antonsen, presents a selection from monumental bodies of work produced between 2019 and 2025. The presentation includes textile assemblages, wooden sculptures and wooden reliefs from ‘Klage for de døde,’ ‘De fleksible,’ ‘Ikonostas,’ ‘Vi er margen’ and ‘Vindfall.’
In an experimental, energetic and rough-hewn visual language, Nervold Antonsen explores society, existence and identity in relation to nature’s fundamental forces and cycles, often with a personal and local grounding. An artistic goal is to create encounters in which oppositions emerge: the material and immaterial, growth and decay, and what is buried and what comes into being.
Four works from ‘De fleksible’ are monumental human figures roughly cut with a chainsaw from whole spruce trunks, each bearing visible wounds and cracks. The series grew from conversations between the artist and people who had experienced vulnerable lives, and the resulting work addressed power and powerlessness, human conflict and vulnerability, as well as the capacity to rise again. ‘De fleksible’ was presented at Kunstnernes Hus in 2023.
The exhibition also includes four textile portraits from ‘Ikonostas,’ a series in which painterly and textile techniques meet across highly detailed works of overwhelming scale. The title refers to the icon wall that separates the most holy space from the rest of an Orthodox church; for the artist, it also marks the distance contained in a face and the impossibility of getting behind another person.
The monumental works are installed in the timber barn at Nyfossum, a rustic setting. Nervold Antonsen, born in 1974, trained at Bergen National Academy of the Arts and lives and works in Rollag in Numedal.
