Galleri Opdahl

In light of the development of the Covid 19, the exhibition LAID BARE by Rebecca Ackroyd will be open by appointment only until March 22nd, 2020

Please contact the gallery at:

T: +47 99296636 / info@galleriopdahl.no

Laid Bare

14.02.2020 – 22.03.2020

Familiar yet immediately unsettling, Rebecca Ackroyd’s work spans within the notion of time and space. Anchored in questions of collective and national identity, loss and absence, reality and the surreal, reflections on alternative paths not taken in the past rise to the surface. Ideas of what could have been, fragments that got lost, the overlooked and underrated that now only lives in the forgotten are taken back into question and given a new body.
 
Through her multifaceted approach Ackroyd explores expressions within objects, sculpture and drawing. Varying in scale and format, the works are often extended into their surroundings by site-specific installations that with the use of light, textiles and architectural structures enable an extended narrative. A dialogue between the objects and the space opens as their memories and capabilities begins to share experiences, a fluid confabulation released from the boundaries constituted by time.
 
Rebecca Ackroyd’s drawings inhabit a three-dimensional quality that presents an almost physical manifested structure one is eager to touch. Slithering hair-like tentacles intertwine with familiar objects such as keys and buildings, moving between and within the realm of the abstract and figurative. As in a dream, the tentacles seem to be seconds away from devouring its objects, oozing a sensation of a collected yet dangerous determination.  Heavily pigmented colours in pink, green and red are balanced with the emptiness of black open spaces, penetrating the surface of the paper and disappearing into a depth far beyond the wall on which they are mounted.
 
Extending the sentiment of pulsation throughout Ackroyd’s drawings, her sculptures and objects embody a narrative strongly conjoined with the aftermath of a disaster. Hands without bodies left in the process of typing on a computer, writing in a book, legs in fishnet stockings and thigh-high boots without a torso still sitting on a chair. Fragments of bodies left in positions detached from the catastrophe they seem to have experienced, locked in an act as if their bodies still remained as a whole.  Dirty, sticky, burnt and dead, the materiality of the detached limbs resembles how one could imagine human flesh that has been dragged to hell and back while simultaneously reflecting an absurdly disjointed consciousness to their recent trauma. As flickering fragments of a grotesque scenario, the objects are manifested in an existence difficult to comprehend, laid bare as silent witnesses to a memory yet to be revealed.

Text by Pernille Dybvig
 

To Be The Key

Opening Friday Nov 22nd, 2019

Exhibition period Nov 23rd 2019 – Jan 12th 2020

Oscillating between fiction and illusion, Drury’s images embrace the uncanny as a vehicle for investigating the practice of painting. Best known for his large-scale oil paintings, Drury also makes prints, pastel drawings and watercolours.

Fluid lines and vibrant fields of colour play a key role in the construction of his images, which include recurring liminal motifs of shadow, reflection, and refraction. The world he creates is an off-kilter echo of our own. Perspectives are bent while picture planes are flattened and littered with visual puns and nods to personal and art histories.

Drury’s new body of work employs a saturated palette to depict unpopulated interiors. Informed by ideas of house-sitting, these paintings offer us an opportunity to snoop around domestic spaces that are not our own. Standoffish and quiet at first, the images track the progress of a fictional house-guest as they begin to make themselves at home.

Dickon Drury (b.1986, Salisbury, UK) Completed a BFA in Fine Art Painting at Falmouth College of Art before graduating from his MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2016.
Solo shows include The Who’s Who Of Whos at Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2016) IF THE SEA WAS WHISKEY at Frutta, Rome (2017) and Holed Up at Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger (2018)
Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo presentation at Carlos Ishikawa for CONDO London in January 2020 and a solo show at Koppe Astner in late 2020.

Natalie Dray

October 26th – November 18th, 2019

TOM HOWSE

Precambrian Swamp Jazz

Opening Saturday 31st of August, 1 – 4 pm

Tom Howse’s paintings balance between realism and fantasy and explore what the artist describes as the dichotomy between our quest to know and our fallibility to comprehend. Explaining the mysteries of the cosmos, the earth and humanity; the theme of life and death; and the causes and meaning of natural phenomena, has bewildered humanity since ancient times. Taking it’s form in folklore and myths, Howse is interested in how humans are drawn towards explanations found within these stories and how they are used to sooth the fear of the unknown.

Tom Howse was born in Chester, England in 1988. The artist currently lives and works in London.
In 2018 he was one of five artists to receive the John Moore’s Painting Prize and was shortlisted for the Caitlin Prize (2012) and the Prunella Clough Painting Award (2012). Recent solo exhibitions; Post- Celestial Compost, 2017, Rod Barton Gallery, London; Secondhand Toad Poems, 2017, Tanja Pol Galerie, Munich. Selected group exhibitions; I Must Be Seeing Things,2019, Ratskeller Galerie, Berlin; Kaleidoscope,2019, Saatchi Gallery, London; Condo London,2019, Koppe Astner, London; John Moore’s Painting Prize, 2018, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Roald Kyllingstad

Opening Saturday May 11th I 1 – 4 pm

Exhibition period May 12th – June 14th

Roald Kyllingstad (*1942) lives and works in Stavanger, Norway. The artists high-end finished exhibits intersect photorealism and abstract painting. His paintings are workings of extraordinary precision, proficient craftmanship and subtle nuances of colours – the almost hyperreal images are solely crafted with pastel crayons. His subjects are frozen moments of tranquility, deserted spots at night and abandoned places. Kyllingstad’s motifs are selected from the world of consumerism: shop window displays, shop interiors or parking-lots. He translates those ‚familiar’ pictures into a preternatural dimension far beyond the wellknown or trivial. The impact and application of artifical light is one of his most chief instruments. „I am fascinated the way light can alter the shape and surface of any objects“, says Kyllingstad. Even if he grants us a view of those in-depth and photorealistic scenarios, we are left outside, merely observers: astonished, bewildered and puzzled. Kyllingstad shows the paradox behind the ‚illusion of transparency’. Not: We see, what we see! But: We see what we want to see! As a result of each individual experience.

Our perception is not transparent und our sense of reality is not common. What is left, is the disbelief in an objective reality, in the existence of an impartial outside world.

Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensibus

(There appear not to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed any in. According to Aristoteles)

Opening hours during the exhibition from May 19th, by appointment: +47 91613947

February 15th – March 17th 2019

December 2nd 2018 – January 13th 2019

From Tue 11th – Sun 23rd of December, weekdays by appointment only.

Saturday  11:00 – 15:00 / Sunday 12:00 – 16:00

PER DYBVIG

Opening Friday October 26th, 7 pm

Last week from Tue 20th – Fri 23rd of November, by appointment only.

Saturday 24th  11:00 – 15:00 / Sunday 25th   12:00 – 16:00