No Looking Back

Rune Olsen

May 17 - July 30, 2025

Opening Reception:

Saturday, May 17th, 6-8 PM

Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present No Looking Back, a solo exhibition of new sculptural works and mixed media drawings by Rune Olsen. This powerful and unflinching show delves into themes of memory, identity, and vulnerability, with a central copper and salt sculpture anchoring the exhibition—an ephemeral, life-sized figure that crystallizes both the fragility and endurance of the human condition.

Born in 1971 in Stord, Norway, Olsen draws deeply from personal experience to create figurative, emotionally charged sculptures using common domestic and industrial materials: copper pipes from hardware stores, mirrors, Q-tips, and household fixtures like sinks and shower curtains. In No Looking Back, Olsen expands this language to include raw salt—a material both ancient and unstable—to build a haunting human form that isas much about erosion as itis about preservation.

The salt and copper figure stands as the exhibition’s emotional core: a body formed from a substancehistorically tied to survival, healing, and decay. It evokes the erosion of memory and the cost of carrying trauma, echoing Olsen’s own experience growing up queer on a small religious island in Norway during the height of theAIDS crisis. Alongside this work, other sculptures reflect his ongoing engagement with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and neurodivergence.

Complementing these sculptures is a wall installation of intimate collage drawings, each 36 x 40 inches orsmaller. These works, raw and layered, echo Olsen’s preoccupations with neurodivergence, body dysmorphia, andqueer identity. They serve as fragmented portraits—moments of tenderness, anger, absurdity, and resilience.

Since his first solo exhibition of assisted ready-mades in 1997 at UKS in Norway, Olsen’s work has been shown across the U.S. and Europe, including at The Bronx Museum, Smack Mellon, Exit Art, LaMama Galleria, Islip Art Museum, and Kunstnernes Hus. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America. He has received numerous awards from the Norwegian Government, held fellowships with the New YorkFoundation for the Arts, and completed residencies at Art Omi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Now based in New York’s Hudson Valley, Olsen continues to push the boundaries of material and meaning in pursuit of honest expression. No Looking Back is a visceral call to witness, challenging us to see ourselves in the vulnerable, flawed, and ultimately human figures he sculpts.