Stein Rønning
Script-intern II, 2026
May 28 – June 27, 2026

We are pleased to announce a new exhibition with Stein Rønning; the opening reception will take place on Thursday, May 28 from 6-8 pm.

Script-intern #II is Rønning’s fourteenth exhibition with Galleri Riis since his first in 1987; and presents new individual sculptures and photographic works as a continuation of Rønning’s Script-intern #I exhibition with the gallery in 2024.

The exhibition features works from two series of sculptures that date back over three decades. One series has over the years been given the title dstnc, which points out that they were first made to create a distance in considering them as objects, and at the same time denotes the fact that they have been moved away from this starting point through several iterations which have been generated using both analogue and digital tools. In the latest generation 4.0., manual reading has been used to scan a digitized form. A series of small formats is cast in bronze and some slightly larger ones are cast in plaster and coated with iron oxide in shellac. The second series is titled dbl blnd and refers to the fact that these works were made blindly. This exhibition features versions of generation 3.0., which are subtracted enlargements by eye measurement of a triangulated digital form based on photographs of the first generation. One version here is in celadonite in shellac on plaster, and another in bone black on silver gelatin on plaster and kaolin bound in cellulose.

Furthermore, works from four groups of photographic images are shown. Some of the footage used in these works date back twenty years and some are completely new. The groups have associative titles such as Red Dust which points to Ma Jian’s book from 2003. Albers / Arnolfini is a series of green images, the Cranach series has a dark ground and Feininger consists of gradients. Structurally they originate from the same “image”, where light reflected from juxtaposed pairs of closed boxes is thrown into a darkened box that is punctured, i.e. the camera.

Stein Rønning (b. 1953) in Askim, Norway, received his artistic education from The Academy of Art in Trondheim and Vestlandets Kunstakademi in Bergen, 1975-79. After several decades of teaching and holding professorships at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Bergen Academy of Arts and Design, Rønning has exhibited regularly in recent years, as well as published a series of booklets and two monographs. In his work he pursues an interest in combining painting, photography and object. His photographic prints seem to camouflage as painted surfaces and the finely tuned nuances among the works themselves command a heightened sense of attention in the viewer, as well as a calibration of the exhibition space. Rønning employs a similar complex and conceptual approach to his long-standing and meandering series of sculptures in various materials such as plaster and cellulose coated with pigments and polymers, as well as patinated cast bronze.