Material Shifts looks at sculpture as an act of translation. Traditionally, the notion of sculpture recalls a stable object rendered in a robust material: something frozen in time and space. Still, sculptural practices have always also retained a notion of “material shifts”: from mold to cast, from sketch to three-dimensional form, or from idea to physical realization.

The works in this exhibition highlight sculpture’s transitional qualities. Spanning from conceptually driven works to material explorations, installations that activate the spaces they inhabit, and existing objects repurposed as art, together they map sculpture as a field made vital through translation. Ideas from outside the field are used to dynamic effects, as objects slip from one state into another.

The idea of ‘translation’ connects practices that are all distinct and often singular. The artists move between different media and formal qualities, creating a dynamic passage across shapes, materials, languages, and ideas. For some, translation becomes an act of transformation—a remaking of one thing into something materially or conceptually different. For others, it is a matter of transition, a more gradual shift from one form or thought into another—an alteration.

While the word translation is generally understood to be concerned with language, an additional meaning is the rendering of a thing in another medium or form, or adapting it to another system, context, or use. This action—of lifting something from its source and reshaping it—is foundational to sculpture itself. Classical Greek sculptors carved a semblance of soft skin and draped textiles from hard stone, and, in the twentieth century, the readymade transformed the meaning of an ordinary object by recontextualizing it as art. The artists in Material Shifts undertake numerous such translations, often through precise and imaginative exchanges between categories—such as moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional forms, from the fleeting to the permanent, or by giving physical presence to ideas not previously existing in any shape or form.

The exhibition includes works by, amongst others, Ane Mette Hol, Kaare Ruud, Stein Rønning, Mungo Thomson, and Diane Simpson.

Curated by Owen Martin and Steinar Sekkingstad.

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