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15/9/2004

Per Inge Bjorlo

Galleri Wang, Oslo

You're so shiny, Ma...

Galleri Wang are proud to present an exhibition of works by Per Inge Bjørlo, one of Norway's major and most distinctive artists of the last twenty years, whatever the genre.

Bjørlo is a salient example of an artist whose unsurpassed working of a wide range of different materials and formats creates an oeuvre full of contrasts. His works comprise large sculptures and paintings commissioned for public places, but his production also includes smaller scale drawings, prints and, more recently, 'hybrid' objects resembling furniture.

Per Inge Bjørlo achieved a major breakthrough in 1984 with his legendary installation Inner room 1 at the Henie-Onstad Art Centre at Høvikodden just outside Oslo. Here he filled a room with refuse such as rubber blasting mats, conveyor belts, tyres, wood chips as well as with enormous linoleum prints in black and white. This exhibition aroused a considerable stir in its capacity as an early example of a crossover art installation: the observer was confronted with a room in which pictures and industrial by-products hung side by side ­ a technique that Bjørlo is still using to this day. In 1988, Bjørlo represented Norway at the Biennial in Venice and one of his installations is permanently on exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo. His monumental pieces are a feature of many of Norway's public places. The most well-known are perhaps his steel sculptures at Oslo Airport Gardermoen and at Oslo Central Station.

Bjørlo created the entrance portal of the Olympic Ice Stadium at Gjøvik for the Winter Olympics held in Norway in 1994. This portal is now to be moved to Oslo and will be used in conjunction with the National Museum of Art's new premises at Nydalen.
At Bjørlo's last exhibition at Galleri Wang in 1998, he showed a large-scale and in some ways interactive installation where the public were physically involved in the work; for instance, visitors were forced to move around in a room where sharp pieces of glass stuck out of the walls.The current exhibition focuses more on the works themselves and any feelings of real danger are absent. Nevertheless, the sculptures can appear overwhelming due to their massive physical presence in the gallery. Bjørlo's art always arouses strong feelings.

On the ground floor, the exhibition shows Bjørlo's most recent sculptures made of welded steel. These works are at once heavy and industrial but also almost organic, warm and rather humorous. They may be characterised as abstract, but Bjørlo likes to tell a story through his choice of form, which compels the works to become part of an ambiguous and distinctive symbolic universe. Both sleigh runners and propellers are recognisable features of these sculptures, but the way they are put together defies any logical understanding.

On the first floor, Bjørlo presents some of his most recent furniture objects or mind objects, as he calls them. These have previously been shown at the Art Nouveau Museum in the town of Ålesund, Norway. These pieces of furniture cannot be used, but their shape nevertheless evokes associations to the private family home. But this is no perfect, faultless family idyll we are witness to: the objects are brutal and fragile at one and the same time. They play not only on the individual's physical attributes and mental constitution but also on the family as a vulnerable organism that can very easily fall apart and where incidents of minor or major importance can harm us and effect our minds for the rest of our lives.

Bjørlo's art is essentially humanistic in intention. His starting point are human beings as emotional and feeling individuals, complete with all their fears, doubts, shame and joy.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 16 September at 7 pm

For further information, please contact us: + 47 22 11 51 70.

Our next exhibition, from 23 October ­ 21 November, features photographs by Marte Aas.

Galleri Wang
Kristian Augusts gate 11
Oslo

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