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Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Room, Goodnight Breasts
15.03-11.04.2003
Opening: March 15th, 5 pm

Torbjørn Rødland, b.1970, is the next artist to be exhibited at Galleri
Wang. The exhibition will be shown at the same time as there is a larger
gathering of Rødland’s works at The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art
in Oslo.

In recent years, Rødland has become one of Norway’s most recognized
artists. Despite his young age, he has exhibited in most parts of the
world, and he has developed a highly characteristic expression.

In his latest pictures, the forest has been substituted by the dark
room. Scenographic montages and artificial lighting have taken the place
formerly occupied by Rødland’s iconographic pine woods, low evening
light and drifting clouds of fog. At first sight, it may seem as if the
artist has wished to purge this exhibition of all his most familiar
pictoral elements. The sunsets are gone, the majestic trees are gone,
the Nike shoes and the carrier bags from Rimi are gone, and so are the
Satanists. But only seemingly so. The core of the artist’s earlier works
has been maintained and developed further.
In the exhibition, which has been titled Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Room,
Goodnight Breasts, you will meet an assembly of odd characters. A
topless miss in pyjamas trousers, holding a pencil in her hand, peeks at
you through a pair of oversized glasses, two men wearing green plaster
casts are tugging a rope as if they are in the prosess of hoisting a
sail, a rope lies abandoned on the empty deck of a yacht while smoke
drifts past, a girl cries light brown tears. The light is sharp red and
freezing green, the characters are apathetic and wear an estranged,
trancelike and distanced countenance.

Rødland, the landscape photographer has gone indoors. The urban has
stepped into the background. The red evening light of the landscapes has
turned even redder, the fog and the clouds have been replaced by
mechanically produced smoke and the dreaming models have acquired an
even more dreamlike expression. All the pictures bear German titles.
This enhances the romantic, gothic appearance of the pictures. The dark
undertows that used to glow in the artist’s sweet, light landscape- and
animal scenery, and perhaps especially in his portraits of Norwegian
Black Metal artists, have now sprung out in full bloom.