Anne-Karin Furunes
Another Time
3 OCTOBER – 9 NOVEMBER 2024
GSA Gallery is proud to present Anne-Karin Furunes’ fourth exhibition with the gallery.
Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes is renowned for her striking works that challenge the limits of perception. Using perforated canvases, she creates images that transform depending on the viewer’s distance and the interplay of light. Her practice often centers on portraits and historical archival photographs, giving voice to the forgotten and marginalized. In this exhibition, Furunes turns her attention to neglected nature, whose slow decay and worsening condition reflect the ongoing climate crisis.
Furunes employs a distinctive technique in which she punches tiny holes into large black or white canvases. By creating images through perforation, breaking the surface of the canvas, she initially sought to liberate herself from the constraints of modernist painting traditions. Viewed up close, the works resemble intricate, almost abstract patterns, but as the viewer steps back, a world begins to take shape—landscapes emerge from shifting networks of light and shadow, as though they are gradually reclaiming their form. Through this subtle transformation, Furunes invites us to reconsider our relationship with memory, presence, and absence. Her works interweave themes of identity, collective memory, and the impermanence of life, evoking a sense that time itself inhabits the images.
These landscapes possess a timeless quality, with muted light and blurred contours heightening the sensation of something constantly shifting between the near and the distant, between life and loss. They seem to exist in a delicate threshold, balanced between what is here and what has already faded.
Furunes reminds us that every shadow conceals a light, every loss holds a presence—and it is up to us to look closely, to uncover what is waiting to emerge.
Anne-Karin Furunes, born in 1961 in Ørland, Norway, lives and works in Trondheim. She studied both art and architecture for a decade, graduating from the Oslo School of Architecture in 1985, followed by the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts in 1992 and the Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts in 1994, where she is now a professor. In 2025, Furunes’s work will be the focus of a solo exhibition at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, WA. Her work has been exhibited at Vigeland Museum, Oslo, Norway (2024); Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Norway (2021); Palazzo Fortuny during the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2014); Yellowstone Art Museum, WY (2014); and Millesgården, Lidingö, Sweden (2014). She is represented in public collections worldwide, including the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kistefos Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design, among others.