Sjur Eide Aas
It's already late
Skylight Hall
14.09.2023 – 15.10.2023

In his first exhibition at Kunstnerforbundet, Sjur Eide Aas takes us into an empty, distorted reality with Kafkaesque humour up his sleeve.

Centered in the room under the skylight is a pavilion-like structure. Elements such as sand, straw and concrete blocks are surrounded by steel plates that are attached together. Thin copper and aluminum plates cover the walls and form reflec­tive surfaces that point back to their sur­roun­dings. The surfaces become abstract shapes and moving images where light, objects and people are distorted. Rather than repre­senting some­thing con­crete on the image surface, the works open for reflec­tion and specu­lation. On one of the long walls, we find a small drawing from the artist's sketchbook. The sketch is the starting point for the exhi­bition, a dreamy and abstract drawing.

Aas' whimsical, sculptural works give the imagination great scope before it all crystallizes in a sensation of absence and emptiness. It is easy to attri­bute stories and references to the sculptures, even if we are repeatedly reminded of the emp­tiness of it all. Like in the work Exhibit C, where a collap­sed man in a suit with a western hat has mysteri­ously vanished into thin air, or has he maybe under­gone a meta­morph­osis? The stories we tell our­selves and others, in order to avoid the un­cer­tainty, not knowing, not existing. The attention is then directed towards the con­crete evidence we can find that the physical, visible world is real.

Text by Kamilla Langeland with Sjur Eide Aas
Translated by Kunstnerforbundet

Sjur Eide Aas (b. 1989, Stavanger) lives and works in Gjerstad, Agder. He has a MFA from the Univer­sity of Art and Design in Bergen and a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Trond­heim. A selection of his solo exhi­bitions includes Reminisens at Agder Kunst­senter (2022), At Hermit Street Metro Entrance at Entrée, Bergen (2021) and The Miracle of the Burning Bush, Was All in Your Head at NoPlace, Oslo (2019). Group exhi­bitions include Cavalo Galeria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2020), Tromsø Kunst­forening (2020), and Golsa Galleri, Oslo (2019). Eide Aas had a residency at the Jakob Weidemann artist residence in 2019-20.

The exhibition is supported by Kulturrådet.