Torbjørn Rødland’s photographs are produced through film-based cameras and chemical processing. His self-aware and often uncanny photographs, films, and books are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. They take on existing visual forms and genres from still lives to portraits to landscapes, but without the research tone of first-wave conceptual art or the ironic commentary of the subsequent Pictures Generation. Attempts to seize and to integrate truth, rather than to deconstruct it, accompany Rødland’s inclination to delve into problematic aspects of contemporary photography and the history of art. He probes popular visual languages in search of both spiritual and perverse qualities, so as to prolong our engagement with the single and the moving image.
[excerpted from Nils Stærk website: www.nilsstaerk.dk]
Rødland’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in the US and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Malmö Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and MoMA, New York.
