Trine Lise Nedreaas

rine Lise Nedreaas, a multi-disciplinary artist primarily working with video, is also an accomplished drawer and sculptor. Her earlier work revolves around a fascination with human enthusiasm, ambition, and passions, often focusing on those outside conformity. While she is best known for her intriguing and beautiful films, Nedreaas works in various media including drawing, sculpture, and photography. Her first solo show at Galleri Brandstrup in May 2015, titled 'Superterrestrial,' had a conceptual theme, exploring the mind-blowing endlessness of time and space through simple materials and playful human performances. Inspired by human ambitions to grasp the intangible, the show brought these vast concepts down to an earthly scale.

Nedreaas' films lie somewhere between portraiture, performance, and documentary, assembled into rhythmic multi-screen installations with a symbolically rich visual language. These films often portray solitary performers on the fringe of society, isolated from their usual audience and stage, absorbed in their specialized acts. Her use of intimate close-ups, scratches, and light spills on the film material echoes the physical scars and imperfections of a lived life, conveying a sense of instability, fragility, and agency in a world that carries on regardless. The ungraspable mystery of life, the nothingness after, and the meaning and origin of it all are underlying themes in her work, which, despite their seriousness, manage to have a warm and humorous tone.

Through intimate, playful performances and makeshift materials, Nedreaas’ work explores our shared experience of a temporal existence in a relentless eternity. She uses materials metaphorically to reflect the difficult personal and political entanglements people navigate, teasing to the surface the human desire to control, excel, fabulate, identify, order, and assert oneself as a means to find purpose and belong. Her subjects often depict isolated protagonists alone in their passions, creating an aesthetic that is uncanny and disturbing, yet determined and driven, often humorous and sympathetic to the stuttering and stumbling, always trying.

Nedreaas studied art history at the University of Bergen and Fine Art in London at Central Saint Martin and the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the billboards of Times Square in New York, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, PS1 MoMa in New York, Kunstwerke in Berlin, Palazzo delle Arti in Napoli, Everson Museum in New York, Kunstverein Schwerin, New Center for Contemporary Art in Louisville, MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome, the International Biennial Bienalsur in Buenos Aires, Boca Raton Museum in Miami, Art Pavilion in Zagreb, Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and Astrup Fearnley in Oslo. Nedreaas' work is represented in private and public collections such as Nasjonalmuseet, KODE in Bergen, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Albright Knox Collection in the USA, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, and Staatliches Museum Schwerin in Germany. She has developed commissioned artworks for Den Norske Opera og Ballett in Oslo, Koksa property at Fornebu, and Inspiria Science Centre in Moss. Trine Lise Nedreaas lives and works in Bergen, Norway.