New York, United States
Rune Olsen is a Norwegian artist living in New York. Since his first solo show in 1997 at UKS in Norway he has exhibited widely throughout USA and Europe, including The Bronx Museum in New York, the Drawing Biennial at Kunstnernes Hus in Norway and the 2005 Istanbul Biennial. His work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Sculpture Magazine, Boston Globe, Austin Chronicle, New York Times, and Star Ledger. Rune Olsen has won 11 awards from The Norwegian Government, including a distinguished Three-year work grant for young emerging artists. He has been awarded the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, a studio residency with Artist Alliance in New York, a place at the renowned Art Omi International Artists Residency, and an Artist in Residency with Headlands Center for the Arts. Rune Olsen’s sculptures are featured in the ground-breaking exhibition The Sex Lives of Animals on permanent display at Museum of Sex in New York. Rune Olsen is a 2009 fellow in sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He currently lives and works in Paris, completing a year-long residency at CITE International. Through installations, sculptures, and flat-works I conduct sociologically informed investigations into the corporeal and mental boundaries of desire, power structures and society. I want to confront complex, emotional and often marginalized subject matters while experimenting with the audience’s responsiveness to becoming participators in the sculptural space. Though we can live in our minds, as an animal the physical is vastly more exciting—arousing our urges, hijacking our minds, and generating obsessive thoughts and questions. How do essential instincts govern our actions? What makes us behave in a certain way? How do we make decisions? How do instincts affect these decisions and how do these impulses relate to the instincts of other animals? I explore these questions by meticulously researching real and recorded imagery of animals and people at their most primal. What emerges from this research are life-size sculptures that I form through the process of constructing armatures; fleshing them out with massive amounts of archival tape and aluminum-foil; and finishing with a violent application of graphite markings and taped lines. These familiar, cheap and easily malleable (“social”) materials allow me to work with a sense of immediacy that is enhanced with the inset glass eyes—hand-painted in Germany to look like my eyes. The contrasting relationship between the explicative figure, the glass eyes, and the intuitive application of graphite markings and taped lines enhances the visceral expression of my work and conveys the intensity and urgency of instinctual behavior that is both arousing and transformative.
“Rune Olsen’s beautifully composed, often shocking, masking tape-covered sculptures are some of the most visually seductive and physically intriguing figurative works being produced today. His three-dimensional tableaux, representing man and beast in various positions of sexual dominance and compliance, interweave personal narrative with mind-expanding revelations about natural-science.”
Francine Koslow Miller
Revising Natural and Sculptural History, Rune Olsen,
Sculpture Magazine, January/February 2009 (6 page article)
(The Contemporary Figure)
