The Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway is currently exhibiting Jan Christensen's "All Those Moments Will Be Lost" until March 9th. Christensen has explored different aspects of contemporary art and its markets in his previous works. His 2007 piece, Relative Value, which consisted of 100,000 krone (roughly $16,000) affixed to a 4 x 2 meter canvas, was stolen from it's exhibition, generating international media attention for Christensen. Christensen's aggressive attitude in his art comes from his background in graffiti, and can be seen in large-scale works such as his series, Painting Myself into a Corner, in which the artist uses thick painterly gestures to saturate a corner of the gallery in solid color. Christensen is restlessly creative, not content to be confined to a single medium. He segues between two and three-dimensional works, incorporating abstract images, video stills, text, and graffiti-based works. Christensen has previously exhibited across Europe and in the United States, both at the Galleri MGM in Oslo and at the Buia Gallery in New York.
For the Stenersen exhibition, Christensen ventures into the realm of light and sound, orchestrating an eclectic experience for the viewer by incorporating designs of the past and music of today. He has displayed over 80 lamps, dating from the Bauhaus period to the present, which he collected around Germany, where he currently lives and works. The artist has appropriated these "established design classics" and accompanied them with a contemporary soundtrack composed and produced by Rolf-Yngve Uggen and Johnny Skalleberg. The installation consists of the colorful lamps hung at various heights from 15 platforms suspended below the ceiling. The emanative qualities of the music and the luminosity of the lamps envelop the viewer and take the sensory experience a step beyond his previous, more visually exciting works.
