Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Norway’s Buzzing Art Scene
Cylindra Gallery of Norway:
A symbiotic experience of art, furniture and nature A contemporary gallery, Cylindra Gallery focuses on Peter Opsvik’s work. His ergonomic chairs are known across the globe, including the Tripp Trapp chair and his different Balans chairs, but at Cylindra Gallery, he focuses on furniture objects and cabinet-like paintings. Welcome to Cylindra Gallery: a symbiotic experience of art, furniture and nature. Photos: Galleri Cylindra
“Peter Opsvik’s cabinets play on the duality between the closed and the open. They exist as a kind of objectified thing somewhere between functional furniture and existential art. Some of his cabinets bear a closer resemblance to a rectangular painting, where the doors are openable hatches, like those on an advent calendar. In others, the whole cabinet consists of fold-out elements, reminiscent of a Japanese origami figure, or sev46 | Issue 113 | June 2018
eral uniting in a cabinet,” Allis Helleland, former director at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo once said. Even though Peter Opsvik is most famous for his furniture, he has also been working with visual art and different objects since the 1960s. His first major exhibitions were held at Kunstindustrimuseet in Oslo in 1986 and in Bergen in 1996 – both showcasing his sculptural furniture.
In addition to his Cylindra cupboards and cabinets, Cylindra Gallery will this summer display a selection of Opsvik’s work, both new and older pieces. It is not easy to categorise his artwork as belonging to a specific category. As he himself puts it: “How do you define a cupboard that can’t house objects, or paintings where you can open the canvas to reveal storage for messages or objects? Do cupboards need contents? What hides behind closed doors? How many will walk away from an open door?” The idea of these cylindrical designs came into being when Opsvik was experimenting with the cylindrical shape at the beginning of the 1980s. “When I worked in graphic art and with paintings on pa-