Norway-based artist Per Kristian Nygård has filled the exhibition space of the NoPlace gallery in Oslo, with a hilly, rolling landscape of grassy mounds. The grass sculpture was grown from seeds that had been planted a couple of weeks earlier during the extremely hot but short Norwegian summer. This meant that the already damp room created the optimal growing conditions for the sculpture.
Per Kristian Nygård works with installations and sculptures as a kind of explorations of both the capabilities and limitations of the spatial – space and object. Methodologically based on relatively simple assemblies or collage techniques but implementation often very laborious.
This sculpture had a basic but comprehensive wooden construction supporting it’s 4500 liters thick layer of soil and seeds, and in order for the grass to grow the installation needed daily watering and maintenance.
In ‘Not Red But Green’ Per Kristian Nygård is trying to make something that doesn’t make sense. But in stead by searching for the poetic potential in the potentially destructive, visitors are confronted with their own intuitive and physical response to the experience of entering a space where everything’s wrong but feels right.
all images © JASON OLAV BENJAMIN HAVNERAAS – courtesy of NOPLACE