19.6-6.7.25

VILDE ROLFSNES

Bestiaries, 2025

Sorgenfri is pleased to present Bestiarium, a solo exhibition by Vilde Rolfsnes. This collection of paintings explores light, corporeal sensation, and emotion through the mystical lens of nighttime.

Drawing inspiration from medieval bestiaries—moralizing texts that portrayed animals as allegorical figures—Bestiarium continues a tradition of symbolic storytelling. Animals embody human virtues, vices, and spiritual meaning, linking ancient narratives with contemporary emotion. Rolfsnes navigates this poetic terrain with sensitivity, asking what remains of these symbols in the modern imagination.

With an instinct for the uncanny, her work occupies a liminal space between reality and dream. Twilight recurs as both setting and mood, offering a space where the ordinary becomes enchanted. Domestic animals drift through these scenes as symbolic anchors—silent witnesses that reflect inner states and invite psychological interpretation.

Rolfsnes’s use of color captures light with emotional precision—soft, magical, and attuned to natural rhythms. Her paintings become psychological landscapes, blurring boundaries between the external world and internal feeling.

Driven by curiosity and a desire to explore the unknown, Rolfsnes often extends her imagery beyond the canvas. In some works, frames morph into eagle legs, merging structure with myth. Playful, even impish figures may suggest chaos, shyness, sexuality, or euphoria—feelings shaped by teenage naivety and later tempered within a stable form, echoing the bestiary’s tension between wildness and meaning.

Vilde Rolfsnes studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and is based in Oslo. Bestiarium marks her first collaboration with Sorgenfri and reflects a deepening of her practice—attuned to light, psychology, and the quiet rituals of observation.

See available works here