At Kunstsilo, a major retrospective explores the quietly enigmatic world of one of post-war Norway’s most distinctive painters — from military barracks and abandoned machinery to model aircraft, memory and landscapes shaped by history.
A major retrospective for a singular Norwegian painter
From 5 November 2026 to 4 April 2027, Kunstsilo in Kristiansand presents Leonard Rickhard: The Model Constructor, a major retrospective dedicated to Leonard Rickhard (1945–2024), one of the most influential artists of post-war Norway. Bringing together celebrated paintings, rarely exhibited works and material previously little seen by the public, the exhibition offers southern Norwegian audiences the first full presentation of Rickhard’s artistic practice. It is an overdue opportunity to encounter an artist whose restrained, precisely composed images made the apparently ordinary — a truck, a barrack, a workshop, a stretch of landscape — quietly charged with mystery.
Memory, machinery and the traces of war
Rickhard’s paintings are inhabited by abandoned machinery, sand and gravel pits, rusting vehicles, military barracks, model aircraft and the particular light of inland Agder in southern Norway. Their starting points were often personal: childhood recollections, close observation and the persistent physical traces left by the Second World War in the places around him. Rather than illustrating a narrative, these motifs create an unsettling balance between the everyday and the enigmatic. A barrack or a disused industrial site can become a vessel for memory; a carefully made model aeroplane can suggest both childhood concentration and the wider shadow of conflict.
Inside the artist’s working process
The exhibition’s most compelling element may be its access to Rickhard’s working world. Developed in close collaboration with artist Jan Freuchen and Berit Rickhard, the project draws on an extensive archive of sketchbooks, notes, photographs and scrapbooks, much of it rarely shown until now. Together, these materials reveal the slow, methodical and deeply considered process behind the paintings: the way an image was assembled, tested and refined before it reached its final stillness. Kunstsilo will also show works Rickhard created specifically with the museum in mind, adding an unusually direct link between the artist’s late practice and this new presentation in Kristiansand.
A fitting setting at Kunstsilo
Housed in a former grain silo on the waterfront of Kristiansand, Kunstsilo has quickly become one of the most distinctive new cultural destinations in the Nordic region. Rickhard’s attention to industrial structures, material remnants and the emotional life of functional spaces makes the setting especially resonant. Visitors exploring southern Norway will be able to see the exhibition from Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday between 11am and 5pm, with later opening until 9pm from Wednesday to Friday; entrance tickets can be booked through Kunstsilo.
Suggested Online Sources
Kunstsilo — Leonard Rickhard: The Model Constructor; Kunstsilo — official website.
