Material Shifts / Pushwagner

This fall, Astrup Fearnley Museet presents two new exhibitions: Material Shifts is an international group exhibition on contemporary sculpture, and Norwegian artist Pushwagner is featured in a solo presentation.

Material Shifts 
November 13, 2026–February 28, 2027

Olga Balema, Katinka Bock, Ludovica Carbotta, Rhea Dillon, Miho Dohi, Vincent Fecteau, Ane Mette Hol, Brad Kronz, Jean-Luc Moulène, Germain Ngoma, Kaare Ruud, Stein Rønning, Diane Simpson, Dima Srouji, Mungo Thomson

Material Shifts looks at sculpture as an act of translation. Traditionally, sculpture evokes a stable object rendered in a robust material: something frozen in time and space. Yet sculptural practices have always also involved forms of material shift: from mold to cast, from sketch to three-dimensional form, or from idea to physical realization.

The works in this exhibition highlight sculpture’s transitional qualities. Spanning from conceptually driven works to material explorations, installations that activate the spaces they inhabit, and existing objects repurposed as art, together they map sculpture as a field made vital through translation. Ideas from outside the field are used to dynamic effects, as objects slip from one state into another.

The idea of translation connects otherwise distinct, singular practices moving between media, materials, languages, and ideas. For some, translation becomes an act of transformation: a remaking of one thing into something materially or conceptually different. For others, it is a matter of transition, a more gradual shift from one form or thought into another.

While the word “translation” is generally understood to be concerned with language, an additional meaning is the rendering of a thing in another medium or form, or adapting it to another system, context, or use. This action—lifting something from its source and reshaping it—is foundational to sculpture itself: from Greek sculptors carving the likeness of soft skin from hard stone to the readymade recontextualizing everyday objects as art.

The artists in Material Shifts undertake numerous such translations, often through precise and imaginative exchanges between categories: moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional forms, from the fleeting to the permanent, or by giving physical presence to ideas not previously existing in any shape or form.

Curated by Owen Martin and Steinar Sekkingstad.

Pushwagner 
November 28, 2026–April 11, 2027

Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner (1940–2018) created an exceptional artistic realm, in which modern life and dystopian visions of the future played out in drawings, paintings, prints, and friezes. Pushwagner continuously reused and redeveloped his own motifs in various media, producing an idiosyncratic visual language that has drawn close scrutiny. 

The exhibition returns to the origins of Pushwagner’s work, based on key series from his early phases (1970s–90s). It goes back to where the artist’s hand meets the paper or canvas, and to where the artist reuses his own material. With a unique sensibility to popular culture, Pushwagner captured the zeitgeist in a science fiction-like language of comics. His artistic project actively and critically pointed to the homogeneity created in modern capitalist society—from cities in which people are crammed into crowded high-rise buildings, to authoritarian leaders waging remote technological warfare.

The exhibition explores these issues, which were at the core of Pushwagner’s oeuvre—highlighting a historical practice that continues to inform contemporary artists and remains highly relevant still today. The exhibition is the first major presentation of Pushwagner’s work in a museum in Norway since his passing.

Curated by Live Drønen and Solveig Øvstebø.