In us – Gunvor Nervold Antonsen at Nyfossum
The exhibition In us, by artist Gunvor Nervold Antonsen, presents a selection from monumental series of works produced between 2019 and 2025. The works include textile montages, wooden sculptures and wood reliefs from the series Complaint for the dead (2025), The flexible ones and Iconostasis (2023), and We are the margin (2019).
In an experimental, energetic and rough-hewn style, Nervold Antonsen explores society, existence and identity, often with a personal and local anchoring, and always in interaction with the fundamental forces and cycles of nature. The rawness of the expression is central, and there is a power present in the artist's use of materials and techniques, a resistance that provides access to the themes of the works.
One of Nervold Antonsen's artistic goals is to create encounters where contrasts emerge: the material and the immaterial, growth and decay, what is buried and what emerges. Not least, the dimensions of the works are often crucial, where physical quantities such as mass, quantity and weight come into play, giving us families of works that can be experienced both closely and intimately, and at a distance in monumental contrast to our own bodies.
«The meeting between this feeling that it is a matter of life and death and the physical and concrete things we experience and create, between the immaterial and the material, is for me the place of art.»
"For me, it is important that experiences of contradictions and resistance in our daily, but also spiritual, lives are made visible and become part of the concrete in art. Presence is projected through thematic content, but also lies in the physical challenges of the works and in their creation. The works make it clear that art, like humans, goes through struggles, both material and procedural.»
The exhibition at Nyfossum displays a selection of individual works from last year's series, featuring wooden sculptures and textile montages from The flexible ones (shown in 2023 at Kunstnernes hus, Oslo) is central.
Gunvor Nervold Antonsen
Gunvor Nervold Antonsen (born 1974) studied at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and lives and works in Rollag in Numedal. Her works have previously been exhibited at Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, Trondheim Art Museum, Kunstnerforbundet, Kunsthall Stavanger, Lillehammer Art Museum, Vigeland Museum, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall and Telemark Art Museum. Her works have been purchased by the National Museum, KODE, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, the Government Quarter, Norges Bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and she has carried out public commissions for KORO, among others. She has received a number of awards for her work, most recently the Ingeborg and Per Palle Storms Honorary Award (2024) for her sculptures. Nervold Antonsen has also been involved in the social and political role of textile art, and as chair of the Norwegian Textile Artists (2006-2009), she helped establish the SOFT gallery and summarised the history of Norwegian textile art in the long poem Ode to a washcloth, hymn to a tiger. Nervold Antonsen has published books and publications in collaboration with other authors, as well as his own poetry collections., We are the margin (2019), and In me you will find (2026), both published by H//O//F.
