Blue in Green is built around two registers of time. In the first room, the sea: photographs made from a boat on a single February morning, in the cold blue and bone white of winter on the water. In the second room, the forest: photographs made across months and weathers, dense with the greens of moss, birch and fern. One morning, one year. The exhibition holds these two speeds beside each other.

The blue series is one boat trip. Tronvoll and her captain had made the same trip many times before, learning the route, the speeds, the angles, until on this February morning the work and the day finally came together: light, swell, weather, and a captain who could hold the boat where she needed it. She held her breath and waited. The camera sits at the height of the water, the rock close enough to read. To be in nature, not in front of it.

The forest works differently. It accumulates: a stream in late autumn, birches in early summer, a fallen birch in a flooded reed bed, mist over the trees, moss on stone seen close. Look longer and the jorplehus emerge, stone shelters built into the landscape to store potatoes through the winter. The walls are nearly a metre thick, turfed over for insulation; the dome roof carries a single opening, the ljore, for light and air. Their arrival on Hidra is dated to 1777, the year of the three axes, when the potato came to Norway. Two centuries on, they have settled into the ground around them. Where the sea is one morning, the forest is a year of returns.

The works are titled by date. "08.02.24_b", "29.05.24", "21.11.23". The titles record only the day. The approach is documentary; the result is poetic, full of weather and atmosphere. Each picture stands as a single document; together they compose something larger. The blue room reads almost as a single sustained breath: ten square frames of the same morning, the same swell, the same kind of light, the variations small but consequential. The forest room asks the eye to slow down, the photographs separated by seasons rather than minutes, each one to be met on its own terms. To stand in the two rooms in sequence is to feel time at two different scales.

The title borrows from Miles Davis. "Blue in Green" was recorded for Kind of Blue in 1959, a slow piece that hangs in two colours and never quite settles. The photographs are colour prints from negatives, hand-printed in a Berlin darkroom and mounted on aluminium, in editions of five.

About Mette Tronvoll

Mette Tronvoll (b. 1965, Trondheim) is among the most established photographers of her generation in Norway. Trained at Parsons School of Design in New York in the early 1990s, she has worked between Oslo, New York, and Berlin throughout her career. Her practice has long sat within the orbit of the German photographic tradition, from August Sander and Neue Sachlichkeit onward. She received the Candida Höfer Art Prize in 2007 and has held the Norwegian state artist's grant Statsstipendiat since 2016. Her photographs are held in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, The New York Public Library, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Nasjonalmuseet, the Astrup Fearnley Museum, and the Kunstsilo / Tangen Collection, among others. Recent exhibitions include her solo presentation Tid at Kunstsilo in 2025 and the group exhibition Modern Women / Modern Vision: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection at the Hudson River Museum, New York, alongside Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Dorothea Lange and Cindy Sherman.