Torbjørn Rødland: Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs

David Kordansky Gallery, Chelsea New York · Chelsea

Exhibition on view: Mar 12, 2026 - Apr 25, 2026

Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs marks Torbjørn Rødland’s return to New York with two bodies of work. Using ultra-compact 35mm cameras, he revisits early concerns, placing figures within charged landscapes that evoke dream and romanticism. Larger-format images probe intimacy, power, and religion through staged encounters. Embracing improvisation and analogue process, Rødland creates unsettling scenes where familiar forms yield strange, irreducible presence.

Artist

Torbjørn Rødland

Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world photographic subjects, Rødland portrays scenes designed to generate psychological reaction through his depiction of highly sensory qualities.