In Landscape or Portrait?, Jeannette Christensen explores how materials, format, and time shape a painting — and how the painting continues to progress, even after it is left by the artist.

The exhibition’s title points to how open for interpretation the works are. Traditionally, portraits are shown in a vertical format, landscapes in a horizontal one. Christensen’s paintings can be read differently depending on how they are displayed. When the works are mounted vertically, they can be read as portraits — present, intimate, and bodily. In a horizontal format, they may appear as landscapes, with a broader, more universal scale. The format itself thus becomes a key to how we relate to and interpret the work.

The material reinforces this ambiguity. The works are made of gelatin, a mutable substance that dries, shrinks, and changes over time. The movement of the gelatin allows the motifs to resemble both skin and landscape, but also something infinitely vast: star nebulas, galaxies, traces of time.

Time has been and continues to be a recurring theme in Christensen’s artistic practice. A line can be drawn from her series The Passing of Time. Working with models, she reenacts the scenes of Vermeer’s paintings, capturing these as Polaroid photographs. She has repeated the same motifs with the same models several times between 1994 and 2020. The aging of the model becomes a concrete expression of the passage of time, a visual proof of the changes in body and face. Polaroid photos consist of a gelatin-based emulsion that begins to change shortly after exposure. The images fade and distort depending on temperature, light, and storage. Both the Polaroid artworks and the gelatin pieces compel an experience of time as more than just an abstract concept — time becomes visible, tangible, and inextricably connected to the work.

Christensen’s works invite the viewer to encounter painting as something more than a frozen image; instead, they are ongoing processes where time is given form as visible traces on the surface.

Since autumn 2024, Christensen has been a guest artist at REAL kunst, University of Oslo (UiO), where she collaborates with Dirk Linke, professor of molecular microbiology at the Department of Biosciences. There, she is further developing her exploration of gelatin from a microbiological perspective. Christensen is participating in an exhibition based on the meeting between art and science at the Science Library, UiO, April 25 – June 15.

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Jeannette Christensen (b. 1958 in Oslo) was educated at the Bergen School of Art and Design, Vestlandets Academy of Art, and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris in the 1970s and 80s. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo National Academy of the Arts from 2010 to 2022. One of Christensen’s gelémonochromes was recently shown at the new National Museum as part of the collection exhibition (2022–2025). The gelatin installation Every Day is a Miracle II was shown in an old salt cellar in Budapest alongside the exhibition Extended Present – Transient Realities at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary (2022). Christensen’s works have been acquired by institutions including the National Museum, KODE Bergen, Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Preus Museum, KORO, the Norwegian Arts Council, and others.

The exhibition is supported by the Ingrid Lindbäck Langgaard Foundation, the Norwegian Visual Artists Fund (BKV), and REAL kunst, University of Oslo.