Kaare Ruud

Femtensesse proudly presents a solo presentation of Norwegian artist Kaare Ruud at Paris Internationale 2025. Through a distinctive sensitivity to materials, Ruud’s work oscillates between familiarity and estrangement. Across photography and sculpture alike, his works unfold through mirroring and repetition—objects interlocked, or eyes gazing from the wall—circling around memory, intimacy, and the act of observation itself. By stretching, dismantling, and animating found objects, Kaare Ruud strips them of their original logic and function, revealing their poetic potential and questioning how human influence shapes our surroundings.

The presentation includes “Full Picture”, a photographic series based on images selected from Ruud’s family photo albums. Chosen with both care and humor, the photographs invite layered readings from a child’s perspective as well as an adult’s. They evoke experiences often felt rather than spoken—moments of intimacy, discomfort, and inherited gestures that linger across generations. The eye-shaped cutouts in the passepartout stem from the shared gaze between Ruud and his partner in moments of drowsiness.

Complementing the photographic works are sculptural pieces made from watches and shoes, transformed into configurations that hover between the personal and the universal. Wristwatches, sourced from Paris flea markets during Ruud’s residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, are assembled into bodily forms, suggesting figures intertwined in symbiotic embrace or caught in monogamous echo chambers. This act of fusion continues in Ruud’s sculptures made from men’s leather dress shoes, pressed together to form wheels, suggesting power spinning endlessly, trapped in its own motion.

Kaare Ruud (b. 1993, Gausdal) lives and works in Oslo, Norway. He graduated with an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2020. Ruud is currently presenting the solo exhibitions Business doing pleasure with you at Femtensesse, Oslo, and Weather forever at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2025). In 2026, he will take part in a group exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall. Recent solo exhibitions include This page is blank on purpose, Stormen kunst/dájdda, Bodø (2023); hvit kirke grav kaffe duk, Samlingen, Nesodden (2023); Retningen høner sparker, Heerz Tooya, Veliko Tarnovo (2022); Out of love, Hulias, Oslo (2022); Album og Volum, Norsk Billedhoggerforening, Oslo (2021); Days, weeks, years (ode till den apatiska), Galleri Toll (2021), Stockholm; and Feistmuggjen, Norsk Billedhoggerforening, Oslo (2020). His work has been featured in group and duo exhibitions at SIC, Helsinki (2025); Possible Sometime Tomorrow, Paris (2024); Femtensesse, Oslo (2024); CANTINA, Aarhus (2023); and Sol Nexø, Bornholm (2022). His work is included in the collection of The National Museum, Oslo.