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Torbjørn Rødland: Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs, on view from March 12 through April 25, 2026 at David Kordansky Gallery, marks the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York in nearly a decade. Bringing together two distinct bodies of work, the exhibition reveals both a return and a departure: a renewed engagement with the formal traditions of twentieth-century art photography alongside a notable shift in method and scale. Known for images that unsettle as much as they seduce, Torbjørn Rødland continues to test the medium’s capacity to conjure meaning from ambiguity.
The front gallery features a suite of smaller-format photographs made with ultra-compact 35mm viewfinder cameras. Embracing the constraints of these tools, Rødland positions figures within expansive surroundings—forests, waterways, quiet streets—allowing landscape and atmosphere to carry equal weight. The effect recalls strains of Northern European romanticism, yet the mood is not nostalgic. Instead, these works suggest that archetypal imagery, long dismissed as sentimental or overdetermined, can be reactivated. References to composers such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener evoke a pared-down spiritual intensity, where simplicity becomes a conduit for mystery rather than certainty.
Deeper in the gallery, larger-format photographs stage charged encounters between bodies and objects. Hands, skin, fabric, and sculptural fragments meet in scenes that feel at once intimate and estranged. Power dynamics—sexual, religious, psychological—surface without settling into fixed interpretations. In works like Awkward Seat, a precarious interaction with a devotional figure becomes a metaphor for contact itself: between subject and world, artist and material, viewer and image. Rødland’s choreography balances improvisation with precision, foregrounding the alchemy of light, shadow, and chemical process that underpins analogue photography.
Throughout his career, which has included presentations at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Serpentine, Rødland has explored how photography can render the familiar uncanny. Here, “bones in the canal” suggests remnants—forms emptied by time—yet the images insist on their latent vitality. Drawing from cultural memory while resisting cynicism, Rødland crafts pictures that feel suspended between knowledge and doubt, inviting viewers into a space where meaning remains open, provisional, and vividly alive.
Image:
Torbjørn Rødland: The First Curtain, 2024 - 2026 © Torbjørn Rødland, courtesy of the David Kordansky Gallery