Yngvar Larsen: Perennis
August 13 - September 12, 2026
On 13 August 2026, Snø Galleri will open Perennis, a solo exhibition by artist Yngvar Larsen.
Larsen has been working as an artist for more than 30 years, across installation, printmaking, sculpture and painting. His practice is rooted in a conceptual and context-based approach, with ideas playing a more important role than a particular artistic style. His work often deals with the bigger questions of human existence, while exploring themes related to politics, ethics and religion.
Over the past 30 years, Larsen has spent long periods living and working outside Norway, including in Ghana, China, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium. These experiences have had a lasting influence on his work. Living away from his home country has also given him the opportunity to look at both his own background and the world around him from a different position, that of an outsider, moving between different places, cultures and ways of seeing.
One of the more distinctive works in the exhibition is Passport (2023), a print made from a shredded Norwegian passport reproduced in original 1:1. The work asks how few elements are needed for a single red surface to carry a rich and complex meaning.
The work also reflects on the passport as a form of identity. For Larsen, who spent many years living and working abroad, it made it possible to move freely between countries and continents. A passport represents both who we are and the freedom to move. As an important work in the exhibition, Passport also connects the other works, bringing together personal experience, identity and movement with wider social and historical questions.
Before the pandemic, Larsen ended his long periods abroad and returned to Oslo. Since then, his work has gradually moved towards a quieter and more restrained visual language, with painting once again becoming an important part of his practice. Yet beneath this apparent calm, repetition creates room for change. The same composition, image or visual element can return again and again, each time taking on small differences and new possibilities.
Perennis continues Larsen’s exploration of repetition and change, and of the connection between personal experience, history and the world around us.
Yngvar Larsen
Untitled (Red Shredded Passport), 2023 Relief print, framed in walnut with museum glass. print: 29.7 × 21 cm
Edition of 50
Yngvar Larsen
360° profile, 2026
Plaster, oil paint, gold from Temu, Mexican coffee sack
Yngvar Larsen
Liberty and Death 2023-2025
Oil on canvas
46 x 380 cm
Yngvar Larsen
2026 years, 2026
Oil on canvas
24 x 33 cm
Yngvar Larsen
Endless columns, the bamboo is laughing, 2009 Approx.
4000 plastic cups, glue, 4 tables
Yngvar Larsen
The Waterloo Battlefield Paintings 2017 - 2019
Soil and charcoal from the battlefield, egg and oil tempera
40 x 30 cm
Yngvar Larsen
Perennis, 2026
Oil on canvas
200 x 200 cm
Yngvar Larsen
Waterloo Period, 2025
Made of soil collected from onion and sugar beet fields
Once soaked in rainwater and blood, covered in smoke from burnt flesh and bones