8.1.—1.2.2026

Galerie Anhava is happy to celebrate the opening of its 2026 programme with an exhibition presenting recent works by Anne-Karin Furunes. Renowned for her signature technique of perforated canvases, Furunes conjures up striking portraits of individuals alongside those of Arctic flora, land- and seascapes or glaciers.

The manually perforated paintings use light as medium and subtraction as method: Furunes has often said she’s drawing with holes; she’s painting with the immaterial. The paintings reside on the verge of constant disappearance as the image changing with distance, inviting the viewer to take an active part in the process of observing and seeing.

For Furunes, the starting point of a work is often a photograph found through research in a chosen archive. By transforming images of forgotten fates into paintings – archived history and fading memories back into our time and consciousness – the works call attention to unjust pasts, to the blind spots of today, and to our increasingly endangered futures.

In recent years, Furunes has worked with the archives of a Norwegian botanist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen (1873–1943) – a pioneer in nature conservation, who took part in two polar expeditions in1907 and 1908, and first to capture the nature of Svalbard in colour photography. Many works in the exhibition stem from those intimate, delicate photographs, taken with the observant eye of a nature scientist, transformed in Furunes’s paintings into hauntingly beautiful artworks breathing with light. Alongside images based on Resvoll-Holmsen’s photos, we see paintings of nature with a starting point in Anne-Karin Furunes’ own photography, portraits of nature through the eyes of an artist.

Lately the monochrome canvases have, from time to time received an added layer of coloured dots in magenta, yellow and cyan, creating vivid colour images of clouds, icebergs or the most recent works, poppies and other flowers.

Beyond the timelines expanding to history and future, Furunes’s works play with scale – vast Arctic vistas paired with flowers, leaves or bird nests, each portrayed with the same careful observation and gravity as portraits of a human being. Nature in the exhibition is shown as an all-encompassing entity, both a sublime marvel yet always inseparably part of us – and us as equally part of it.

ANNE-KARIN FURUNES (b. 1961, Norway) is one of the most renowned international Nordic artists. Furunes lives and works in Stjørdal, Norway. Last years, her works have been shown in solo exhibitions for example in National Nordic Museum in Seattle (2025); Vigeland Museet in Oslo (2024); Ryan Lee gallery in New York (2023); Nordenfjedske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim (2021) and Museo Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2014), alongside many group exhibitions around the world. Furunes has completed numerous public art commissions mainly in the Nordics, with the latest to Oslo in 2025 and in the main building of the University of Helsinki in 2022. Her works have been acquired to international private and public collections such as the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museo Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; Saastamoinen Foundation; and Statens konstråd, Sweden. Apart from her artistic practice, Furunes has been working as a Professor at the Trondheim art Academy since year 2000.