Nordic Museum, Seattle (USA) March 15, 2025 – June 8, 2025
Research is central to the creation of Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes’s painted portraits and landscapes. She combs through collections of archived photographs and joins scientific expeditions to the far reaches of the globe.
In Furunes’s first solo exhibition in a US museum since 2010, she will present paintings inspired by the historic and recent photography of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago situated between the North Pole and Norway. She studies the pioneering autochrome photographs captured by botanist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen (1873 – 1943) more than a century ago, alongside more recent documentation of glacial recession and ice calving. The effects of the climate crisis are magnified and multiplied in Furunes’s monumental format and unique technique. Her perforated paintings on canvas are singular images that resemble the halftone process of printing
Another group of paintings on display includes portraits of people from Finland, Norway, and Sápmi who were subjected to government-ordered sterilization and documentation between 1900 and 1939. Drawn from her “Of Faces” series, these haunting portraits raise awareness of the Nordic countries’ participation in eugenics practices in the early 20th century. Furunes finds in Sweden’s oldest library—Carolina Rediviva at Uppsala University—archived images of silenced, ignored, and persecuted individuals. She then translated these documentary photographs into large-scale paintings, portraits in the humanistic tradition. Through her powerful work, Furunes exposes the victimization of humans and of nature.
Read more on Nordicmuseum.org
