[ Vitrine · Galleries II–IV · 14 Sep 2026 — 11 Jan 2027 ]
European abstraction between daylight and dark, 1959–1973. Thirty-four works trace how a loose generation of painters stopped painting places and began painting a time of day.
[ The works ]
Nine of the thirty-four works, one wall at a time. Walk slowly — the walls move with you.
[ Room I ]
Evening does not fall. It approaches — along a horizon, up a wall, across a table left in the window. The earliest works in the exhibition still hold the day’s structure: a band, a frame, a ruled line. What changes is the temperature. Watch the greys lean blue.
[ Room II ]
For a few minutes the sky is brighter than everything beneath it, and every colour narrows toward one. The paintings in this room were made over eight years, in three countries, by painters who never met. They arrived at the same blue.
[ Room III ]
What remains when the colour goes is not black. The last room is hung lower and lit lower — the works ask for it. Look longer than feels reasonable. The grid surfaces. The ring completes itself. The dark keeps more than it hides.
[ Floor plan ]
The exhibition unfolds in the order the light leaves the sky. Choose a room to go to its wall — the blue dot keeps your place as you walk.
[ About the show ]
Painters have always kept odd hours. Between 1959 and 1973 — in Oslo studios, in a borrowed room above an Antwerp print shop, on the Finnish coast — a loose generation of European abstractionists began painting not places or things but a time of day: the interval after sunset when light has no source, and colour, briefly, has only one name.
They did not know each other. Most never showed together. Yet the canvases converge with an insistence that no shared manifesto could explain: the same narrowing palette, the same reluctance to let a line close, the same cobalt arrived at from three directions.
The blue hour is not a subject. It is an instrument, and eleven painters learned to play it.
The exhibition gathers thirty-four of these works — several reunited for the first time since they were dispersed at auction in 1974 — and proposes no movement, coins no ism. It makes a smaller claim: that for fifteen years, in different countries, painting kept arriving at the same hour. Seen from this distance, the hour looks less like a moment than a place. We have tried to hang it like one.
— Ines Halvorsen, curator
[ Plan a visit ]
The galleries face west and we hang nothing over the windows. Arrive an hour before close and the exhibition finishes outside the glass.