1st February-30th March 2025
Opening Friday 31st January 7-9pm
Ali Gallefoss’s work freely crosses the boundaries between functional design and experimental sculpture, using chance procedures and natural processes and exploring an expanded vocabulary of forms and materials. He produces unique objects that tell the story of their own production and often seem to belong to multiple, contradictory contexts. They can be useful and accidental, beautiful and formless – but everything he makes has a potential purpose beyond being looked at. Gallefoss won the Bo Bedre International Achievement award 2024, and the Maison & Objet Rising Talent Award 2024.
For Kunsthall Oslo, Gallefoss will combine new sculptures and hand-made furniture in a total installation, transforming the space into an imagined domestic environment. The process is influenced by arts and crafts philosophies, even recalling Asger Jorn’s Imaginist Bauhaus, but Gallefoss’s aesthetic is unique and belongs entirely to the present moment. Using signature materials such as rough-cast aluminium and larvikite – an iridescent stone also known as blue pearl granite and quarried in Norway – as well as glazed ceramics and natural wood, this will be the artist’s most ambitious project to date, and his first institutional solo show.
Ali Shah Gallefoss (Bergen, 1989) lives and works in Oslo, Norway. He holds a BA in Furniture and Spatial Design from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, and an MA in Furniture and Spatial Design from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He won the Bo Bedre Design Award Newcomer of the Year in 2020, the Bo edre International Achievement award 2024, and the Maison & Objet Rising Talent Award 2024. He has been exhibited at Numeroventi (Firenze, 2023), Nevven (Gothenburg, 2023), Galleri Format, Enter Art Fair (Copenhagen, 2023), QB Gallery (Oslo, 2022 and 2021), Galleri Format (Oslo, 2022), Norwegian Presence (Oslo, 2021), 3daysofdesign (Copenhagen, 2020), Dover Street Market (Beijing, 2019), among others.