EXHIBITION NASJONALMUSEET OSLO
New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place
Nasjonalmuseet Oslo, Norway,
23 May - 14 September 2025.
Mikael Olsson
Oaxen
1997-98
Pigment prints on acid free cotton paper
Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake
A serie of 12 photographs from the book Oaxen Skärgårdskrog, Raster Förlag 1999.
New Nordic Cuisine is a movement that started in the Nordic countries in the early 2000s and has since grown into an international phenomenon.
With its interpretations of wild nature, the Nordic climate, local foodstuffs and culinary traditions, the movement spawned a distinctive aesthetic that was expressed in meals, tableware and restaurant interiors. Locally-sourced natural materials, animal skins and untreated wood, handmade ceramics and the use of wild vegetation as raw ingredients and for decoration all featured prominently.
In the exhibition New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place, the National Museum shows how this food movement merged with other contemporary cultural trends. Through architecture, contemporary art, design and crafts from the museum’s collection, and objects loaned from various restaurants, the exhibition examines the “new Nordic” concept as a broad aesthetic development defined by the interaction between materials, people and landscape.
Includes works by Kvae & Bark, Jens L. Thomsen, Fäviken, Edvard Munch, Olafur Eliasson, Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk arkitektkontor, Snøhetta, Jensen & Skodvin arkitekter, Kristine Fornes, Pentti Kaskipuro, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Poul Andrias Ziska/Koks, Piet Oudolf, Knud Leem, Anders Smebye, Magnus Ek/Oaxen, Roderick Sloan, Hans J. Wegner, Toril Redalen, Dyvik Kahlen and others.
A specially commissioned pavilion will be constructed for the exhibition on the square outside of the museum. There will be an extensive programme of events throughout the exhibition period, including design workshops, foraging trips and meals prepared by celebrated chefs.
A version of the exhibition will be on display at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, USA from 7 November 2025.
Curator Exhibition: Martin Braathen and Inger Helene Stemshaug.
Travel support Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
MAY 23, 2025
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T NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
Proud to collaborate with New York Times on this cover story• @tmagazine T’s new Design issue visits families with different relationships to home. Outside of São Paulo, a Brazilian furniture designer and her grown children constructed a compound that accommodates three generations — while allowing everyone some privacy. Over in Italy, an English art dealer decides to recommit to Venice — a city about which he’s had mixed feelings — only to realize that his new apartment in a 17th-century palazzo isn’t so new to him after all … but someplace he knew as a teenager. And our cover story is about the residences designed by the Swedish painter Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin, north of Stockholm. Since the 1940s, their first house, called Lilla Hyttnäs, has been maintained by a group of their descendants.
Photo by @mikaelolsson_
MARCH 20, 2025
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TALK MENDRISIO USI
Welcome
DECEMBER 6, 2024
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EXHIBITION USI MENDRISIO WITH ARRHOV FRICK
ARRHOV FRICK
URSPRUNG
Origine/Origin
With Mikael Olsson
Exhibition promoted by the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana
Curated by Arrhov Frick
15 November 2024 – 2 March 2025
The exhibition path on the ground floor and first gallery of the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio is marked by thematic sections, all of which refer to the design research and method of the Swedish architecture firm Arrhov Frick. They are accompanied by numerous drawings by the architects and large photographs by Swedish artist and photographer Mikael Olsson, who has developed a personal approach in his way of interpreting architecture, namely a radical re-vision and re-presentation through the photographic medium.
NOVEMBER 14, 2024
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EXHIBITION HAVREMAGASINET BODEN
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE HOME
JUNE 10, 2024
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→ The Foundations of the Home: Havremagasinet länskonsthall Boden 2024
EXHIBITION HAVREMAGASINET BODEN
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE HOME
08 JUNE 2024 – 29 SEPTEMBER 2024
Exhibition at Havremagasinet, Boden.
Mikael Olsson, LWRNTZ 01 (Workers’ housing, Karlshäll, Luleå, 1911–13, with T. Stubelius), 2021.
What is a home, beyond the purely concrete space, beyond the architecture, beyond the imagery of home advertisements? The exhibition The Foundations of the Home explores what constitutes a home in its most basic parts: material, sensual and conceptual. Centered around eight foundations – memory, space, the hearth, tradition, care, the shell of the home, the measure of the home, food –, the fundamental and timeless characteristics of the home are interpreted and reinterpreted based on practical, economic, architectural and ideological aspects. In this, the home appears both as a concrete place and as an image, in which current issues of sustainability, authenticity and security are deepened and problematized. The contributions to the exhibition cover building construction, furniture design, carpentry and art, and demonstrate how rules and norms, standardizations and language shape our understanding of the home materially and metaphorically.
The exhibition is curated by Mikael Andersson and Erik Törnkvist.
JUNE 8, 2024
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ART NOTES
ART NOTES by Karolina Modig
FEBRUARY 25, 2024
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EXHIBITION TEATERGRILLEN
Mikael Olsson At
Teatergrillen, Stockholm
30 January - 3 March, 2024
Self-portraiture has a long and meandering history. Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Amalia Ullman, Rafia Santana. If portraiture can be categorised as a social encounter, the self-portrait is a perceptual encounter with one’s own body, and all the physical constraints that such an act entails. The physiological impossibility of seeing oneself has fascinated artists for centuries and inspired great works that play with these limitations. The self-portraits of Mikael Olsson – which are actually demi-self-portraits, as they only capture the top of his head and his bespectacled eyes – are a brilliant entry into the mirror halls of art history.
- Sinziana Ravini
Olsson’s self-portraits/selfies challenge the narcissistic use of selfies as well as the status of influencers. Further he destabilizes the composition of a traditional selfie where the eye line is recommended to be one-third down from the top frame. Through play and intuition, Olsson’s images are marked by both intimacy and distance, the role of his own physical presence and the perceptive relationship to the surroundings.
JANUARY 30, 2024
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Private viewings Nordenhake
T NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
See my work for T New York Times Style Magazine . In southern Sweden, a former schoolhouse has become a minimalist live-work space for the designer Ingegerd Råman — responsible for iconic Ikea collections, including the limited-edition 2016 Viktigt rattan-and-bamboo furniture and accessories line, as well as pared-down crystal vessels for the Swedish glassmaker Orrefors — and her partner of more than 50 years, Claes Söderquist, an artist and experimental filmmaker.
AUGUST 23, 2023
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WHAT IS A HOUSE FOR
Mikael Olsson on Frösakull House by Bruno Mathsson. Read the interview at www.whatisahousefor.com
FEBRUARY 16, 2023
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New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place
Nasjonalmuseet Oslo, Norway,
23 May - 14 September 2025.
Mikael Olsson
Oaxen
1997-98
Pigment prints on acid free cotton paper
Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake
A serie of 12 photographs from the book Oaxen Skärgårdskrog, Raster Förlag 1999.
New Nordic Cuisine is a movement that started in the Nordic countries in the early 2000s and has since grown into an international phenomenon.
With its interpretations of wild nature, the Nordic climate, local foodstuffs and culinary traditions, the movement spawned a distinctive aesthetic that was expressed in meals, tableware and restaurant interiors. Locally-sourced natural materials, animal skins and untreated wood, handmade ceramics and the use of wild vegetation as raw ingredients and for decoration all featured prominently.
In the exhibition New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place, the National Museum shows how this food movement merged with other contemporary cultural trends. Through architecture, contemporary art, design and crafts from the museum’s collection, and objects loaned from various restaurants, the exhibition examines the “new Nordic” concept as a broad aesthetic development defined by the interaction between materials, people and landscape.
Includes works by Kvae & Bark, Jens L. Thomsen, Fäviken, Edvard Munch, Olafur Eliasson, Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk arkitektkontor, Snøhetta, Jensen & Skodvin arkitekter, Kristine Fornes, Pentti Kaskipuro, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Poul Andrias Ziska/Koks, Piet Oudolf, Knud Leem, Anders Smebye, Magnus Ek/Oaxen, Roderick Sloan, Hans J. Wegner, Toril Redalen, Dyvik Kahlen and others.
A specially commissioned pavilion will be constructed for the exhibition on the square outside of the museum. There will be an extensive programme of events throughout the exhibition period, including design workshops, foraging trips and meals prepared by celebrated chefs.
A version of the exhibition will be on display at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, USA from 7 November 2025.
Curator Exhibition: Martin Braathen and Inger Helene Stemshaug.
Travel support Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
MAY 23, 2025
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ Nasjonalmuseet Oslo
T NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
Proud to collaborate with New York Times on this cover story• @tmagazine T’s new Design issue visits families with different relationships to home. Outside of São Paulo, a Brazilian furniture designer and her grown children constructed a compound that accommodates three generations — while allowing everyone some privacy. Over in Italy, an English art dealer decides to recommit to Venice — a city about which he’s had mixed feelings — only to realize that his new apartment in a 17th-century palazzo isn’t so new to him after all … but someplace he knew as a teenager. And our cover story is about the residences designed by the Swedish painter Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin, north of Stockholm. Since the 1940s, their first house, called Lilla Hyttnäs, has been maintained by a group of their descendants.
Photo by @mikaelolsson_
MARCH 20, 2025
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ T New York Times Style Magazine
TALK MENDRISIO USI
Welcome
DECEMBER 6, 2024
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ Mendrisio USI
EXHIBITION USI MENDRISIO WITH ARRHOV FRICK
ARRHOV FRICK
URSPRUNG
Origine/Origin
With Mikael Olsson
Exhibition promoted by the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana
Curated by Arrhov Frick
15 November 2024 – 2 March 2025
The exhibition path on the ground floor and first gallery of the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio is marked by thematic sections, all of which refer to the design research and method of the Swedish architecture firm Arrhov Frick. They are accompanied by numerous drawings by the architects and large photographs by Swedish artist and photographer Mikael Olsson, who has developed a personal approach in his way of interpreting architecture, namely a radical re-vision and re-presentation through the photographic medium.
NOVEMBER 14, 2024
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ USI
EXHIBITION HAVREMAGASINET BODEN
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE HOME
JUNE 10, 2024
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ The Foundations of the Home: Havremagasinet länskonsthall Boden 2024
EXHIBITION HAVREMAGASINET BODEN
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE HOME
08 JUNE 2024 – 29 SEPTEMBER 2024
Exhibition at Havremagasinet, Boden.
Mikael Olsson, LWRNTZ 01 (Workers’ housing, Karlshäll, Luleå, 1911–13, with T. Stubelius), 2021.
What is a home, beyond the purely concrete space, beyond the architecture, beyond the imagery of home advertisements? The exhibition The Foundations of the Home explores what constitutes a home in its most basic parts: material, sensual and conceptual. Centered around eight foundations – memory, space, the hearth, tradition, care, the shell of the home, the measure of the home, food –, the fundamental and timeless characteristics of the home are interpreted and reinterpreted based on practical, economic, architectural and ideological aspects. In this, the home appears both as a concrete place and as an image, in which current issues of sustainability, authenticity and security are deepened and problematized. The contributions to the exhibition cover building construction, furniture design, carpentry and art, and demonstrate how rules and norms, standardizations and language shape our understanding of the home materially and metaphorically.
The exhibition is curated by Mikael Andersson and Erik Törnkvist.
JUNE 8, 2024
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ Havremagasinet
ART NOTES
ART NOTES by Karolina Modig
FEBRUARY 25, 2024
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ ART NOTES
EXHIBITION TEATERGRILLEN
Mikael Olsson At
Teatergrillen, Stockholm
30 January - 3 March, 2024
Self-portraiture has a long and meandering history. Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Amalia Ullman, Rafia Santana. If portraiture can be categorised as a social encounter, the self-portrait is a perceptual encounter with one’s own body, and all the physical constraints that such an act entails. The physiological impossibility of seeing oneself has fascinated artists for centuries and inspired great works that play with these limitations. The self-portraits of Mikael Olsson – which are actually demi-self-portraits, as they only capture the top of his head and his bespectacled eyes – are a brilliant entry into the mirror halls of art history.
- Sinziana Ravini
Olsson’s self-portraits/selfies challenge the narcissistic use of selfies as well as the status of influencers. Further he destabilizes the composition of a traditional selfie where the eye line is recommended to be one-third down from the top frame. Through play and intuition, Olsson’s images are marked by both intimacy and distance, the role of his own physical presence and the perceptive relationship to the surroundings.
JANUARY 30, 2024
Share on Facebook Twitter
Private viewings Nordenhake
T NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
See my work for T New York Times Style Magazine . In southern Sweden, a former schoolhouse has become a minimalist live-work space for the designer Ingegerd Råman — responsible for iconic Ikea collections, including the limited-edition 2016 Viktigt rattan-and-bamboo furniture and accessories line, as well as pared-down crystal vessels for the Swedish glassmaker Orrefors — and her partner of more than 50 years, Claes Söderquist, an artist and experimental filmmaker.
AUGUST 23, 2023
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ T New York Times Style Magazine
WHAT IS A HOUSE FOR
Mikael Olsson on Frösakull House by Bruno Mathsson. Read the interview at www.whatisahousefor.com
FEBRUARY 16, 2023
Share on Facebook Twitter
→ WHAT IS A HOUSE FOR
123456789101112131415