OSLO.- The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Norway presents its 2025 exhibition programme. The programme includes an exhibition about the gothic influences on modern artist like Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, solo presentations of artists A K Dolven and Anawana Haloba, and a survey of the New Nordic Cuisine movement and its connections with architecture, crafts, design, and art in the past two decades.
Gothic Modern. From Darkness to Light
27 February–15 June
Modern artists have often found inspiration in the medieval period. The Gothic aesthetic in particular has been admired by painters and writers alike for its power to arouse strong emotions. "Gothic Modern" presents Northern European art from the years 1875 to 1925 that shows the influence on various levels of the Middle Ages and the Gothic. Key artists include Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, Georg Minne, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Ernst Barlach. Their creations are placed in dialogue with works by Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and others.
This rich and varied exhibition addresses themes ranging from faith and doubt, death, love and sexuality, through to identity and social roles. The exhibition offers new perspectives on Northern European art and art history around 1900. This is modernism of a different kind – a “Gothic modernism”. "Gothic Modern" is a collaboration between the National Museum, the Ateneum in Helsinki, and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
A K Dolven. amazon
24 April–31 August
Featuring works from the 1980s to the present, this exhibition in the Light Hall is A K Dolven’s first full-scale retrospective. It is also the first solo exhibition by a living Norwegian artist in the new National Museum. A K Dolven (b. 1953) works in a variety of media including video, painting, sculpture, sound and performance. Her interests revolve around the tensions that arise from the ways we experience, understand and interpret the world around us.
Known for her references and tributes to artists such as Edvard Munch, Helene Schjerfbeck, Caspar David Friedrich and Peder Balke, A K Dolven is an explorer of art historical and mythological archetypes. Combining this perspective with a keen interest in the contemporary, she creates encounters that are personal, yet timeless and universal. Nature, landscape, the body and interpersonal relationships all feed into works that blend the familiar and the unfamiliar, the minimal with the monumental, and where time itself is engaged as both a tool and a metaphor.
Espen Gleditsch. Sanatorium Stenersen
8 May–31 August
Many aspects of modernist architecture reflect the growth in scientific knowledge about disease, contagion and hygiene. It was an awareness that influenced the design not only of health infrastructure, but also of modern housing. Villa Stenersen is one of the leading examples of these architectural developments in Norway. These connections form the starting point for an exhibition created for the rooms of Villa Stenersen by artist Espen Gleditsch. The exhibition is based on Gleditsch’s own artistic investigations, his studies of archive material and research relating to Arne Korsmo, Villa Stenersen, healthy design, and the origins of modern architecture. This is the first time that Villa Stenersen has featured in a specially conceived artistic project that includes the house itself as part of the exhibition.
Espen Gleditsch (b. 1983) works with photography, often in projects that take architecture as starting point for investigations into the ways history is told and interpreted, and how it changes. The exhibition is at Villa Stenersen, which is regarded as one of the foremost examples of Norwegian modernism.
Stamina. Kari Nissen Brodtkorb and four predecessors
15 May–19 October
Kari Nissen Brodtkorb (b. 1942) is one of Norway’s most highly acclaimed architects. Completed in 1990, the waterfront development at Aker Brygge in Oslo has made her name known far beyond the professional community. For over thirty years, she ran her own architectural office with a team of female employees, taking charge of many large and complex commissions in the male-dominated construction sector. For this exhibition, Nissen Brodtkorb has been invited to co-curate an encounter between her own buildings and the work of four historical predecessors. Women architects who ran their own practices and were recognised in their day, but who have left few traces in museums and archives: Lilla Hansen, Kirsten Sand, Kirsten Sinding-Larsen and Maja Melandsø.
New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place
22 May–14 September
New Nordic Cuisine is a movement that started in the Nordic countries in the early 2000s and has since grown into an international phenomenon. With its interpretations of wild nature, the Nordic climate, local foodstuffs and culinary traditions, the movement spawned a distinctive aesthetic that was expressed in meals, tableware and restaurant interiors. Locally-sourced natural materials, animal skins and untreated wood, handmade ceramics and the use of wild vegetation as raw ingredients and for decoration all featured prominently.
In the exhibition "New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place", the National Museum shows how this food movement merged with other contemporary cultural trends. Through architecture, contemporary art, design and crafts from the museum’s collection, and objects loaned from various restaurants, the exhibition examines the “new Nordic” concept as a broad aesthetic development defined by the interaction between materials, people and landscape. A specially commissioned pavilion will be constructed for the exhibition on the square outside of the museum. There will be an extensive programme of events throughout the exhibition period, including design workshops, foraging trips and meals prepared by celebrated chefs.
Crafts 2000-2025
18 September 2025–1 February 2026
This comprehensive exhibition will present Norwegian and international crafts from the past 25 years. Ranging from large-scale installations to smaller objects, the exhibition explores the breadth of materials and forms of expression within contemporary crafts. The exhibition is a collaboration between the National Museum, Kode in Bergen, and the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Trondheim and will show works from the collections of these three museums.
Anawana Haloba
13 November 2025 – 5 April 2026
The exhibition introduces the work of Zambian-Norwegian artist Anawana Haloba (b. 1978) to a broader Norwegian and international audience. Haloba’s installations appeal to all the senses, including sound and even taste, while also engaging us intellectually. Thematically, she draws on current discourses on Africa’s colonial legacies. With an interest in the oral storytelling traditions of Southern Africa, Haloba often explores the human voice as material and carrier of information and heritage. The National Museum will show a varied selection of her works to date. In addition, the artist will present a new creation – her very own opera; a multi-screen spatial installation that builds on musical traditions from Zambia, exploding and transgressing our conventional understanding of classical Italian opera.
Deviant Ornaments
27 November 2025 – 15 March 2026
"Deviant Ornaments" emerges from a three-year research project, which began with the question: What is the relationship between Islamic culture and queerness? Historically, same-sex desires and acts have been one of many expressions of sexuality in the Islamic world, floating between prohibition, permission, and celebration. Traversing time and geography, this exhibition brings together artists from across the historical and contemporary Islamic world to make sense of this entanglement. It will present artworks in a rich variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, paintings, illustrated manuscripts, and multi-media installations. Together the works will visualize a history of sexuality in the Islamic world.
