Sprekken i gulvet — MORTEN ANDENÆS

Morten Andenæs
Sprekken i gulvet / The crack in the floor
September 26 – November 8, 2025

For nearly two decades, Morten Andenæs’ dense photographs of people, animals, objects and spaces have sought to represent the often contradictory narratives that characterize our initial surroundings, while questioning the role images and language play in shaping reality.

A crack in the floor can be the first sign of impending collapse. It can be a symptom of the gap separating a word from the thing it denotes, or suggest that something hitherto hidden is about to emerge. It can also be a door ajar, affording us a glimpse of something that foreshadows language and forms the basis for the seamless reality typically targeted by the camera, but which we rarely have direct access to.

The crack in the floor consists of twenty-three new photographic works, and is Andenæs’ eighth solo exhibition at the gallery. The works on display are stripped of narratives, but rife with formal tensions. The relationship between surface and volume, figure and ground, absence, emptiness, darkness and shadow forms a grammar of its own. The work Neither shadow nor thing is emblematic. When an object and its shadow merge, the distinction between one and the other, between cause and effect, something and nothing is difficult to grasp.

The relationship between visibility and absence, as well as the limitations of language and the gaze are central to this exhibition. What the works alternately conceal or reveal is not a result of evasion or ambiguity. The unseen back of a piece of brown paper for example, in the work Inside out, or the point where a path disappears out of sight in Spring (path) is indicative of how the photograph is an intersection of a physical surface and illusory space that enables access to the world, while at the same time reminding us of its fundamental inaccessibility.