Exhibitions

ALMOST GROWN UP

Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium turns 20 years old!

– and we are celebrating with a jubilee exhibition!

Almost Grown Up is spread across the four floors that make up the Main Building, where the public can revisit artworks from almost all of the exhibitions that have been shown in our various exhibition spaces – the Main Building, Galleri Star, the Exhibition Hall, and the Project Space. All told, 51 large and small exhibitions.

We have brought together art from many sources and from many different types of exhibition to illustrate VKL’s exhibition history across two decades.

In some years, the exhibitions in the Main Building have been curated, thematic, group exhibitions, such as OH MY GOD! in 2007, SCREAM – an exhibition about fear in 2011, and Contemporary Chaos in 2018. In other years, we have shown works from art collections, such as the opening exhibition For All in 2003 with a selection of works from Jack Helgesen’s collection, Connecting People in 2006 with art from Kiasma, Finland’s national museum of contemporary art, and Tech 4 Change in 2015, a wide-ranging selection from the collection of Statoil (now Equinor). A third type of exhibition was oriented towards a geographical region, such as Grand National in 2010, with British contemporary art, Please Return to Busan Port in 2016, with art from South Korea, and Kubatana. An Exhibition with Contemporary African Artists in 2019.

The Exhibition Hall has been largely devoted to solo exhibitions of Norwegian artists, such as Synnøve Anker Aurdal in 2017 and Trude Viken in 2021. In its first years, Galleri Star was an exhibition space for celebrated international names, such as Joseph Beuys in 2005 and Louise Bourgeois in 2006, but in recent years it has been devoted to older masters, such as Frits Thaulow in 2019 and Peder Balke in 2021. Our Project Space has been an education room, a video room, and most recently the exhibition space for telling the history of the old cellulose factory that previously occupied the building which today houses VKL.

The great majority of the exhibitions mentioned above are represented in the jubilee exhibition – a retrospective cross-section of VKL as an art institution across twenty years.

Further information about earlier exhibitions, as well as the story of how VKL came into being, and of how it has developed in the first two decades, are all to be found in the book that accompanies this year’s jubilee exhibition.

Come and join us in a celebration of 20 years of art in Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium!