PoMo Trondheim Unveils Landmark Catherine Opie and Ken Price Exhibitions in Norway

Following the success of its acclaimed Louise Bourgeois exhibition, PoMo in Trondheim presents two compelling new solo exhibitions celebrating the work of influential American artists Catherine Opie and Ken Price. Mountains Don’t Know Their Names marks Opie’s first solo exhibition in Mid-Norway, showcasing a new body of photographs created during a three-week journey through Norway’s winter landscapes. Meanwhile, Alien Terrain introduces Norwegian audiences to the visionary ceramic sculptures of Ken Price in the artist’s first-ever solo exhibition in the country. Together, the exhibitions offer a thought-provoking exploration of landscape, memory, materiality and the enduring relationship between people and place.

Throughout her career, Catherine Opie has explored the relationship between people, place, and identity. In this exhibition, she turns her attention toward Norwegian mountains, fjords, and traces of human presence within the landscape. Rather than traditional landscape photography, the works function almost as portraits of nature itself.What began as a search for the distinctive Norwegian blue light gradually evolved into a reflection on landscape, photography, memory, and cultural identity.

“I spent days with each mountain, waiting for hours outside, getting to know each other. In that manner, I could best feel their energy, their specificity and create real portraits of this unique part of the world. My original goal was to look for the blue light and portray the mountains but, as things unfolded on the road trip, appeared the idea of the vernacular, the cliché – these relationships to landscape and photography are what ended up being played out for me.”
Catherine Opie, Artist

The exhibition includes 53 photographs from the Norwegian Mountains series, where Opie both embraces and challenges conventions of landscape imagery. The photographs move between documentation and personal experience, between monumentality and intimacy.

The photographic works are accompanied by 30 ceramic mountain sculptures created before and after the artist’s journey to Norway. Part memory, part imagination, the sculptures reflect Opie’s emotional and physical encounter with the landscapes she observed. The works were developed during her residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado — a place also closely connected to Ken Price, who worked there in the 1970s, creating a subtle dialogue between the two exhibitions at PoMo.

The exhibition also features two new site-specific video installations by artist and Emmy Award winning filmmaker Kate Kunath, who accompanied Opie throughout Norway. Kunath’s works capture the poetic, humorous, vulnerable, and determined aspects of the artist’s process, while also raising questions about observation itself — and how the act of looking shapes what we see.

Mountains Don’t Know Their Names is ultimately an exhibition about presence: about the encounter between human beings and landscape, and about our impulse to give meaning, stories, and names to places that exist entirely beyond us. This marks the first major solo presentation of Catherine Opie’s work in Mid-Norway.

In the Post Hall on PoMo’s ground floor, the exhibition Alien Terrain delves into the influential American artist Ken Price (b. 1935, Los Angeles, California; d. 2012, Taos, New Mexico, USA), who redefined the place of ceramics in contemporary art. Throughout his five-decade career, Price demonstrated how clay could be both visually captivating and conceptually rich, while also challenging conventional boundaries of the material.

Bringing together 14 sculptures from the artist’s late period (1995 to 2011), the exhibition presents an artistry where the forms seem to belong elsewhere — an alien terrain that simultaneously bears traces of something corporeal and intimate. This is the first solo presentation of the artist in Norway.

The exhibition Alien Terrain invites the audience to move between these levels: from the tactile to the cosmic, from the intimate to the otherworldly. Here a space emerges where the sculptures are not just
objects, but places—small worlds that can be reminiscent of the body, landscape, and distant planets.

Price consistently challenges the distinction between the handmade and the imaginary. Ceramic, a material with deep historical roots, is used to create objects that seem to come from another reality. The result is sculptures that can be read both as inner landscapes and as alien terrains, as if we are view-
ing something familiar through a sci-fi filter.

“It is a great pleasure to present Ken Price at PoMo, a truly influential artist. After collecting and following this fantastic artist for many years, we have worked closely over time with the family’s estate on this exhibition project. This marks the very first solo presentation of Ken Price in Norway, which I am sure will delight and amaze our Norwegian audiences as well as our international guests.”

Monica Reitan, Chair & Founder, Head of Artistic Committee, PoMo

In works such as Miroesque (1995), Cheeks (1998), and Kabongy Balls (2002), the sculptures appear as small landscapes: rounded, perforated, and undulating. They may be reminiscent of eroded surfaces, as if shaped by wind, time, or unknown geological processes. At the same time, they point to another pictorial world, a sci-fi aesthetic where the objects could be fragments of a lunar landscape or models of unknown planets. This duality is reinforced in Price’s treatment of the surface.

Through a slow process of layered painting, sanding, and polishing, a saturated, almost artificial perfection is created. The surfaces take on a quality that can be reminiscent of something synthetic or illustrated—not unlike the smooth, colourful forms of comics and popular culture, where the world is both hyperreal and alien at the same time. In this context, Price’s sculptures can also be associated with visual universes familiar from classic science fiction and superhero stories, where landscapes and bodies follow laws other than our own.

In later works such as Zyko (2008), Chicton (2009) and Crypto (2011), the forms become more complex and composite, as if they are in motion or transformation. The monumental bronze works Spider Blue (2011) and Yogi (2011) expand this universe in scale but retain a sense of intimacy in the setting of PoMo’s
Post Hall, as if even the large is drawn from something close and tactile.

PoMo
Dronningens gate 10
7011 Trondheim, Norway

find information for PoMo HERE

For more information about Trondheim: www.visittrondheim.no