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.