Private museum addressing gender inequality in Norway’s art scene opens – The Art Newspaper

An formidable new personal museum has opened within the metropolis of Trondheim on the western coast of Norway with a mission to spice up entry to artwork regionally, deal with gender inequality within the nation’s collections and add to the area’s enchantment as a cultural vacation spot.

The brand new museum, referred to as PoMo (quick for Publish Workplace Fashionable), is housed over 5 flooring and greater than 4,000 sq. m within the metropolis’s Artwork Nouveau former submit workplace. It was based by the collectors Monica Reitan and Ole Robert Reitan, who’s a co-owner of Reitan AS, a Norwegian conglomerate spanning retail, finance and property. The couple, who at the moment are divorced, have collected artwork for greater than 20 years. With works by artists together with Simone Leigh, Louise Bourgeois, Anne Imhof and Franz West, their assortment is the place to begin for the museum.

PoMo goals to “tear down among the partitions between the artwork world and most of the people”, says Ole Robert. “Going right into a museum is usually a scary factor.” The brand new museum goals “to create a public house with room for everybody”.

With this in thoughts, the areas, refurbished by the Iranian-French architect and designer India Mahdavi in collaboration with the Norwegian architect Erik Langdalen, are supposed to be vibrant and welcoming. Works on view will vary from Katharina Fritsch’s Madonnenfigur (Madonna determine) (1987/2024), a yellow sculpture of the Virgin Mary beforehand positioned close to a church in Trondheim’s purchasing district, to an Ann Veronica Janssens fog room—to be put in in 2026—which surrounds guests in synthetic smog. The inaugural exhibition, Postcards from the Future (till 22 June), responds to the constructing’s historical past and “the postcard as a thematic metaphor”.

Ole Robert says that he has no downside seeing the museum as a business enterprise—regardless of the pushback he says he has obtained from fellow collectors corresponding to Bernard Arnault and Hans Rasmus Astrup. “They’re artwork folks,” he says. “However I attempt to inform them on a regular basis: business will not be dangerous. It’s not an opposition between business and good high quality. You simply must create an setting for folks to get entry.”

Sixty p.c of the museum’s acquisitions will likely be by ladies artists. Monica says it is a contribution to rebalancing Norway’s artwork collections. On the Nationwide Museum in Oslo, as an example, simply 11.45% of the works within the high quality artwork assortment are by ladies, rising to 19% within the Fashionable and up to date part.

“You will need to say that the Nationwide Museum, Munch Museum and others even have this difficulty actually excessive on their minds, however their collections are so large, [even] in the event that they gather solely feminine artists for a few years, they are going to nonetheless not contribute [enough] to the share,” says PoMo’s director, Marit Album Kvernmo. “We’re strengthening one another and making an attempt to have focus.”

Regardless of these broader ambitions, PoMo is a venture deeply embedded in a imaginative and prescient for Trondheim, Norway’s third largest metropolis and residential to its greatest college. The museum, which is ticketed however free for underneath 18s, is a part of a brand new cultural quarter that additionally contains a theatre the Reitan household has constructed straight behind the museum and a resort reverse it. Close by is one other pretty latest arrival on Trondheim’s artwork scene, the large business gallery Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst (KUK).

Whereas each Ole Robert and Monica Reitan declined to touch upon the prices of organising the museum—that are being lined by the household—the concept is that it’ll ultimately pay for itself. “The entire space is getting extra enticing and extra beneficial [thanks to] this museum arising,” Ole Robert says. “So, it’s going to be financially OK, I feel.”

Each collectors grew up in Trondheim—additionally the house of the Reitan model—and say they wish to pay tribute to their dwelling metropolis. “There’s a French saying, noblesse oblige,” Ole Robert says. “It’s a want to contribute and to pay again in a roundabout way or one other … [PoMo] is a results of our huge love and respect for the town and the folks dwelling there.”