Entrée is proud to present the solo exhibition Evigheten varer lengst (Eternity Lasts the Longest) by Kjetil Skøien. In this exhibition he gathers a selection of collages – works that over the past twenty years have developed during stays in various European cities. In Skøien’s collage works, the city becomes an archive of fragments, a space for collecting, displacement, and recomposition. The exhibition at Entrée is his first solo exhibition of collages.
The collages are based on photographic material found in Paris, Berlin, Tangier, and Rome. He picks up images from cafés, galleries, and theatres. What for others is trash becomes for Skøien a potential for new constructions. Fragments are cut up and reassembled. Across the surfaces he draws constructive lines and allows organic forms to emerge, as if the drawing both holds and opens the image. The performative lies close within the works: how the elements balance against each other, in the tension between the precise and the open, the controlled and the improvised.
Collecting material is an important part of Skøien’s practice. His gaze sharpens in encounters with the accidental; the city is read through details, surfaces, and remnants. In the collages, new connections arise where architecture, body, and landscape slide into one another. The works can resemble diaries – visual notes in which time and movement are stored in the paper.
For several decades, Skøien has worked at the intersection of visual art and performing arts, where performance, video, painting, photography, and text converge in a distinctly performative practice. In Evigheten varer lengst, this interdisciplinary approach becomes visible through a solo performance based on texts by Kurt Schwitters, presented on the opening night. The project at Entrée draws upon Skøien’s earlier theatre production Evigheten varer lengst (1993–97), which was based on Schwitters’s sound poems and one-act plays.
Kjetil Skøien (b. 1952) lives and works in Oslo and was educated at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts. He has had extensive exhibition activity nationally and internationally since the 1980s, at Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (København), Museum Moderner Kunst (Wien), Liljevalchs konsthall (Stockholm), Kunstnernes Hus and Stenersenmuseet (Oslo) among others. Skøien was among the first Norwegian artists to work with video and has long experience as a theatre director and choreographer. In 1986 he started Passage Nord, a project theatre in which visual means are given equal status with text, choreography, and sound. His works are represented in several public collections, including the National Museum and the City of Oslo Art Collection.
