Group exhibitions include Nordic Noir, British Museum, London, UK (2025); The Autumn Exhibition, Kunstnerne Hus, Oslo, Norway (2025); The Armory Show, Kristin Hjellegjerde, New York (2024); Medea, Greek Theatre of Syracuse, Sicily, Italy (2023); Enter Art Fair, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2023); Where Wild Roses Grow, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Schloss Goerne, Germany (2023); The Black Shuck Festival, The Belle Gallery, Bungay, UK (2023); Viriditas - The Mystical in Art, Tegnerforbundet, Oslo, Norway (2023); Drawing Triennial, Tegnerforbundet, Oslo, Norway (2023); Grafikk, Atelier Larsen 50 år, Galleri Thomassen, Göteborg, Swedenn (2022); Hvitsten Salong Atelier Larsen 50 år, Kunstverket, Oslo (2022); Vi star på sammenraste hull, Sandefjord Kunstforening, Norway (2022); Slutten, art project curated by Thiis-Evensen and Sjøvold, Sandefjord Kunstforening, Norway (2021). 

 

In 2025, Sverre Malling was awarded a 10-year 'Scholarship for established artists' by the Norwegian Visual Artists Association, which he also received in 2014. Prior to that, Malling received multiple other prestigious awards including the Aksel Waldemar Memorial Prize in 2010 and the Autumn Exhibition Prize in 2009. In the same year he also was awarded the first Jakob Weidemann Scholarship. Malling's work forms part of important public and private collections which include, The British Museum of Art, UK; Bunker Artspace Museum, Palm Beach, USA; The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway; The National Library of Norway Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg, Norway; Equinor Art Programme, Norway; Nordnorsk Art Museum, Tromsø, Norway, Sørlandet Art Museum, Kristiansand, Norway; Lillehammer University College, Lillehammer, Norway; Johan Strays Stiftelse, Oslo, Norway; Drammens Museum, Norway; Dyno Industri, Akershus, Norway; Skedsmo Kommune, Lillestrøm City Hall, Norway; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway. 

Norwegian artist Sverre Malling (b. 1977) is the maker of possible worlds. Or rather, in his work we encounter possible pasts, presents and futures. History is malleable, and the canons of Western art are revealed as constructions to be renegotiated and reassessed. What is revealed in the purity and simplicity of At The Mistress’ Request, his large presentation of charcoal drawings presented at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, is a distinct, almost haunting image-world.

 

At The Mistress’ Request brings together the astounding range of Sverre Malling’s practice. These works draw their strange charisma and dark virtuosity from the tensions and oppositions that run throughout the history of art. Over recent decades, Malling’s work has been largely devoted to teasing out such frictions, exploring lost connections in cultural history, our pasts as a foreign country. And pasts in the plural, because in Malling’s world the past contains multitudes: something to be reconfigured, redescribed, and reimagined.

 

The deep and often unsettling well of visual culture contains a plethora of conflicting perspectives and narratives, and in his latest exhibition, we experience Malling’s idiosyncratic reshuffling of them. Something unfolds at the centre, and something else operates at the margins, confined to obscurity and eccentricity, ripe for rediscovery and re-emergence. How these domains interlace, and how meaning is generated between them, remains a central concern of Malling’s practice. In his portrait Torje, for instance, we find a sensitive and immediate meditation on modern masculinity. The sinuous, painfully precise rendition of this leonine figure, part hippy, part Baroque peacock, invites ambiguity and incertitude. Elsewhere, a brutal scene of spiked frog-like creatures suggests the phantasmagorical intensity of artists such as Tessa Farmer. Throughout the exhibition, Malling deftly juggles innocence and morbidity, revealing and revelling in their sameness as much as in their tension.

 

By exhuming marginalised figures from English, German and Scandinavian cultural history, Malling’s project of rediscovery becomes a means of reshaping our understanding of art history itself: who is remembered, and who was left behind. Malling’s recent work has engaged closely with English visual culture, as explored in his 2021 exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery. The exhibition mined the roads less travelled of England’s eccentric artistic heroes, such as Austin Osman Spare and Genesis P-Orridge, probing hidden narratives of British folklore, imagery and memory.

 

This approach invites the rich web of references and dialogues with which Malling has long been in conversation. The details and minutiae of Flemish interiors, the Gothic atmosphere and ruin aesthetics of Romanticism, the suspiciously polished surfaces of salon painting, the murky mythologies of national folklore and fairy tales, and the transgressive modernism of twentieth-century culture all intertwine in At The Mistress’ Request and in Malling’s oeuvre. In the shadow of an overgrown, withered castle that seems taken from Caspar David Friedrich, we find the wasted carcass of a Volkswagen; in Salon Desirée, which recasts the language and borders of intimacy,we see howthe silky excess of academic painting mingles with the ephemera of 1970s erotica.

 

Consequently, his drawings engage artists from Vermeer and Henry Fuseli to William Bouguereau and Lord Frederic Leighton, as well as more marginal figures such as Eliot Hodgkin and Arthur Rackham. The aestheticism of painters such as Leighton, Burne-Jones and MacDonald represents a British translation of French and Belgian Symbolism; indeed, the iconography and rhetoric of continental Symbolism were clearly adopted and refracted in English pictorial concerns. There are echoes and vestiges of these stories throughout Malling’s catalogue. Both morbid and childlike, excessive and austere, these visual intimations embrace contradiction and gain their imaginative resonance from a language that is distinctly and unmistakably Malling’s.

 

Archaisms and avant-gardism coexist within the same image. Malling, sinuously, almost like a documentarian, maps their inner consistencies and irreconcilable qualities. He is, in essence, a spiritual ancestor of the architect John Soane, interested in the inexhaustible and ambiguous signs of human cultural activity, an iconographer above all. In the same way, he layers his images, making them symbolically opaque and suggestive: a drawing of a man with the praying hands of Dürer overlaps with the black, austere verticality of the Spanish baroque of Jusepe de Ribera and Zurbarán, while Grünewald’s Crucifixion appears superimposed on his temple, in the shape of a postcard. These heavy historical undercurrents, however, are less about authority than playfulness for Malling. He insists upon the high seriousness of this art, but he also luxuriates in the anarchic interplay of contrasting influences within the same image.

 

The centrifugal force of this exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery — its endless variety, its strange continuities and its literary and iconographic inconsistencies — is the source of its strength and of Malling’s particular quality as an image-maker. One becomes aware, on familiarising oneself with Malling’s drawings, of the arbitrary nature of borders. In At The Mistress’ Request,he presents a deeper, more expansive view of the polarities and oppositions that drive his work.