Øyvind Sørfjordmo
Galleri Brandstrup is delighted to announce Øyvind Sørfjordmo’s solo exhibition Nattgjester (Late-night Visitors). The exhibition opens on Thursday 11 April, 6PM.
The exhibition presents new oil paintings and wool tapestries. Sørfjordmo invites the spectators to engage in active dialogues with the works, allowing their gaze to traverse the surfaces, and venturing into their own interpretative horizons.
Sørfjordmo has worked primarily with painting and sculpture. The textile works presented in the exhibition mark a novel extension to his artistic practice. His recent foray into digital Jacquard weaving has extensively enriched his creative repertoire, allowing him to explore and incorporate the tactile qualities in his works. In creating the pieces, Sørfjordmo has collaborated with the creative resource workshop VEVFT in Innvik. Working with the digital loom, he has rediscovered new potential in old sketches and brought new life to playful line drawings.
The exhibition title has several connotations: guests who stay into the wee hours, thoughts that emerge in the dead stillness of night, or figments of imagination peeping out from shadowy corners. These late-night visitors, whether psychological constructs or waking memories, demand attention, contemplation and sometimes resolution.
The motifs are inspired by landscapes and anthropomorphic figures that Sørfjordmo observes in his surroundings or extracts from memories. These are reimagined and abstracted, creating confrontational and engaging expressions. The vivid interplay of colours and shapes that imbue landscapes with the changing seasons inform Sørfjordmo’s compositions and palette. His abstract collages are composed from various observations, combined with a genuine and playful fascination for form acrobatics. The works in the exhibition illustrate Sørfjordmo’s first attempts to harness fragments from fleeting memory as a way of kick-starting larger pieces.
A notable event that has influenced Sørfjordmo’s recent creative process was the memorable sailing trip he undertook from Reykjavik via Vestmannaeyjar to Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. On this journey, he encountered moments of profound silence, breathtaking nature and wildlife, architectural marvels, and culinary delights. One experience in particular left a remarkable impression - following a day trip to an active volcano, that same volcano later illuminated the dark Icelandic night sky in a brilliant display, a spectacle witnessed by Sørfjordmo during his night watch on the boat deck.
For Sørfjordmo, the creative process is pivotal in the totality of his artistic practice. His works are informed by a process-based approach whereby the creative act is equally important as the finished work. The process has been particularly important in working towards this exhibition. In these works, the painterly properties are exceedingly pushed to reveal new dimensions in terms of colour, composition and structure.
His attentiveness to the creative process involves a willingness to work along the contours of the unexpected. Sørfjordmo welcomes unpredictability, and often finds that errors and mishaps pave the way for innovation. The openness to the process allows his work to evolve in unforeseen directions.