The title of Torbjørn Rødland’s new body of work winks at the search for the divine in the people who pose for him.
If the figure of the child in the Madonna and Child paintings is a symbol of truth, then the pregnant virgin might represent a temporarily hidden, masked truth – trapped behind compromised bodies.
The sequence, dense with symbolism and characterised by a surreal sense of suspension, accommodates the tensions between contingent reality and archetypes, often unexpectedly recalling everyday life in intensely physical and veiledly allusive scenes.
With The Pregnant Virgin, Rødland deepens the dialogue between analogue photography and digital culture, exploring the echoes of the visual arts that anticipated photography before it became the most widespread language.
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