Everything Is Weather

Astrid Nyland’s largest work so far takes over the main hall for five months. The painting is four metres wide and hangs under the skylight, so every day looks different: on a grey morning the orange ground goes almost brown, and by late afternoon the blue rain looks wet enough to touch.

Nyland paints weather the way a child draws it, in a few flat shapes with hard edges and no shading at all. A sun is a circle, a cloud is five bumps and a line, rain is a row of drops. The simplicity is the point. Up close you can see every brush mark, every place she went over an edge twice, and how much work it takes to make something look this easy.

Around the main painting hang the studies she made while planning it, pinned to the wall the way they were in her studio in Oslo. Some are the size of a postcard, some are taller than a person. Together they show a year of changing her mind about where the sun should go.

The exhibition also shows Rain Study No. 4, the first of her works to enter the collection, bought in 2016 when she was still painting in a garage. Seeing the two side by side, ten years apart, is the reason the show exists.