Cory Arcangel: Family Office

Stavanger Art Museum is proud to announce the opening of Cory Arcangel: Family Office, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Norway, which brings together works from the past ten years of his career.

With an education in music and roots in the hacker milieus of the early Internet age, Cory Arcangel (b. 1978, Buffalo, New York) creates works that span performance, music, and video, as well as painting, drawing, and printmaking. He applies strategies from the historical avant-garde in his treatment of digital material and, in accordance with Internet’s amalgamation of cultural expressions, mixes elements from so-called high culture with popular culture phenomena. Artistic collaboration is an integral part of his practice, on a par with self-publication, open access, and genre transgression.

Family Office
In 2015, Cory Arcangel moved from New York City to Stavanger in Norway. Since then, he has incorporated local aspects in his work, both when it comes to the production of artworks and regarding his choice of materials, artistic collaboration and thematics. The materiality of the energy age runs like a common thread throughout the exhibition. The exhibition title refers to the artist’s combination of family and working life during this period, while also opening up to reflections on global phenomena related to technology, power, branding, and economic capital.

Family Office includes several new works and shows the breadth of Arcangel’s productivity as an artist as he moves with relaxed integrity among the various expressions and genres of popular culture. Examples of his collaboration with the fashion designer Phoebe Philo and the music producer Oneohtrix Point Never are shown side by side with works that challenge the aesthetic potential of digital image-processing programs, as well as the circulation of pictures, phenomena, and aesthetic ideals on the web.

Arcangel Surfware Flagship
Central to the exhibition is a life size reconstruction of Arcangel Surfware Flagship, the artist’s store which Cory Arcangel ran in the period 2018–2019 in the Stavanger borough of Storhaug. The shop was both an art project: an experimental studio, a showroom for art, and the place where you could purchase the commercial brand Arcangel Surfware. Founded in 2014, Arcangel Surfware is a “non-aspirational lifestyle brand,” which sells clothes and other retail products for surfing the web. With support from the Inge Steensland Foundation, the shop was acquired in 2024 by Stavanger Art Museum as part of their collection and is now being exhibited for the first time as an installation.

Digital and performative artworks
Making use of strategies such as appropriation, reverse engineering, post-production, and re-contextualization, Cory Arcangel demonstrates how we can be active agents at a time characterized by increased technologization and constraint. Like a digital archeologist, he examines the structures—hacking the imagery as well as the functions—of software, video games, social media, and machine learning. Arcangel is also driven by an archival impulse and has contributed to the collection, organization, and publication of works by other artists, such as for instance Tony Conrad (1940–2016) and Michel Majerus (1967–2002).

The exhibition will also be showcasing several of the artist’s performative works, extending into the city itself. The work entitled Hail Mary—a composition made for the carillon—will be performed weekly in the newly restored Stavanger Cathedral. Cory Arcangel’s collaboration with the vocalist and sound artist Stine Janvin about traditional knitting patterns in the work called Identity Pitches is also included in the exhibition’s extensive side program.

Monograph published by König
A richly illustrated book will be published towards the end of the exhibition period. It will include a conversation with Cory Arcangel by Caroline Busta and Lil Internet of New Models, and essays by media researcher Eivind Røssaak and curator Helga Nyman. The publication is designed by Studio Bergini, edited by Hanne Beate Ueland and Helga Nyman, and will be published by Walter König.