Image: Cory Arcangel, Photoshop CS: 84 by 192 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y 12100, x 0, mouseup y 12100, x 57537; tool "Wand", select y 12100, x 16324, tolerance 138, contiguous on; default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y 24300, x 26379, mouseup y 12100, x 9806, 2019. Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Stavanger kunstmuseum reopens on Saturday, November 14, 2026, at 6 p.m. with a free party open to everyone, and on the same evening launches "Family Office," Cory Arcangel's first solo exhibition in Norway. The show runs until March 29, 2027. The reopened museum is also bringing back its collection displays, with familiar works by Kitty Kielland, Frida Hansen and Lars Hertervig alongside lesser-known pieces from its holdings.
"Family Office" surveys the past ten years of Arcangel's work, a period during which he has been based in Stavanger. The title points to the way family life and working life overlapped for the artist in those years, while also opening onto wider questions of technology, power, branding and capital. Several new works are included. Collaborations with the fashion designer Phoebe Philo and the music producer Oneohtrix Point Never are shown next to works that test the visual possibilities of digital image-editing software and follow how images, trends and aesthetic ideals circulate online.
Since hacking a Super Mario game cartridge in 2002 and turning it into video art, Arcangel has helped bring the technologies of the internet age into the art world. Working across performance, music, video, painting, drawing and prints, he adapts digital material using strategies taken from the historical avant-garde. In 2014 he set up Arcangel Surfware, which he calls a "non-ambitious lifestyle brand," and he moved to Stavanger the following year.
At the heart of the exhibition is a reconstruction of Arcangel Surfware Flagship, the shop he ran in the Storhaug district of Stavanger in 2018 and 2019. It served as an experimental studio, an exhibition space and a store for the brand, and the artist staffed it himself during limited opening hours. With foundation support, the museum acquired the shop for its collection in 2024, and it is now shown as an installation for the first time.
The programme also extends into the city. "Hail Mary," a composition for carillon, will be played at the newly restored Stavanger Cathedral, whose 49-bell instrument from 1925 is described as the oldest carillon in the Nordic region and the largest in Norway. "Identity Pitches," made with the vocalist and composer Stine Janvin and based on traditional knitting patterns, is part of the accompanying events.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1978, Arcangel trained in classical guitar and studied music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory. In 2011 he became the youngest artist to receive a full-floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A catalogue published by König, edited by Hanne Beate Ueland and Helga Nyman, will accompany the show.
