Femtensesse is pleased to present Kaare Ruud’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Business doing pleasure with you.
Ruud’s practice focuses on sculpture and sculptural interventions, often using everyday materials in unconventional ways. Functional objects are transformed into works with unfamiliar qualities. By stretching, dismantling, or animating found objects, Ruud strips them of their original logic and function, revealing their poetic potential and questioning how human influence shapes our surroundings.
The exhibition unfolds as a landscape of oversized tables that shift the sense of scale. Respatex tables, design icons of their time and now symbols of contemporary nostalgia, are reimagined as spaces of memory and tension.
The table holds a social and political role: a place where both the smallest and greatest conversations take place. Animated and strangely alive, they suggest a child’s perspective, reflecting the sense of powerlessness experienced from underneath.
Among this forest of tables hang drawers from Ruud’s childhood home, filled with personal belongings. Rediscovered untouched and flocked, their interiors become velvet-lined jewelry boxes embossed with the reliefs of their contents. In Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter, characters build dementia villages for people with memory loss. Each room reflects a specific time, and sometimes a particular day. Eventually, even those without memory loss begin buying homes to indulge in nostalgia. The novel highlights themes that resonate in Ruud’s work—constructing sculptural landscapes deeply rooted in bodily memory.
High on the wall, a piece made of clock motors nods to monumental public clocks. Instead of telling time, its moving hands draw cryptic images that slowly shift. Ruud’s clockwork speaks of history and repetition, events that recur endlessly and the impossibility of freezing time.
This cyclical movement continues in sculptures made from men’s leather dress shoes, pressed together to form wheels, suggesting power spinning endlessly, trapped in its own motion—a metaphor for capitalism and the hamster wheel of modern life.
In Business doing pleasure with you, Ruud offers a subtle yet critical reflection on our social, economic, and ecological balances, while also examining craftsmanship, or what might still define its contours today.
With thanks to Lukas Kleven, Alba Lasanta Ebbesen, Doris Guo and Øyvind Bast Lie.
Kaare Ruud (b. 1993, Gausdal) lives and works in Oslo, Norway. He graduated with an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2020. Current and recent solo exhibitions include Weather forever, Hordaland kunstsenter, Bergen (2025); This page is blank on purpose, Stormen kunst/dájdda, Bodø (2023); hvit kirke grav kaffe duk, Samlingen, Nesodden (2023); Retningen høner sparker, Heerz Tooya, Veliko Tarnovo (2022); Out of love, Hulias, Oslo (2022); Album og Volum, Norsk Billedhoggerforening, Oslo (2021); Days, weeks, years (ode till den apatiska), Galleri Toll (2021), Stockholm; and Feistmuggjen, Norsk Billedhoggerforening, Oslo (2020). His work has been featured in group and duo exhibitions at SIC, Helsinki (2025); Possible Sometime Tomorrow, Paris (2024); Femtensesse, Oslo (2024); CANTINA, Aarhus (2023); and Sol Nexø, Bornholm (2022). In October 2025 Femtensesse will present a solo exhibition of Ruud at Paris Internationale, and in 2026, he will participate in a group exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall.
