The exhibition

Created in close collaboration with the artist, “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” brings together a new body of work developed during a three-week road trip through the Norwegian winter landscape in 2024.

Throughout her career, Catherine Opie has explored the relationship between people, place, and identity. In this exhibition, she turns her attention toward Norwegian mountains, fjords, and traces of human presence within the landscape. Rather than traditional landscape photography, the works function almost as portraits of nature itself. Opie describes spending time with each mountain, waiting in changing weather and shifting light in order to understand its particular energy and presence. What began as a search for the distinctive Norwegian blue light gradually evolved into a reflection on landscape, photography, memory, and cultural identity.

“I spent a long time with each mountain, waiting for hours outside, sometimes days, getting to know each other. In that manner, I could best feel their energy, their specificity and create real portraits of this unique part of the world. My original goal was to look for the blue light and portray the mountains but, as things unfolded on the road trip, appeared the idea of the vernacular, the cliché – these relationships to landscape and photography are what ended up being played out for me.”

Catherine Opie, Artist

The exhibition presents 53 photographs from the series Norwegian Mountains, where Catherine Opie explores and challenges the traditions of landscape photography. The works shift between the documentary and the personal, the monumental and the intimate.

The photographs are shown alongside 30 ceramic mountain sculptures, created both before and after Opie’s journey through Norway. Part memory, part imagination, the sculptures reflect her emotional and physical encounter with the landscapes she observed. Many of the works were developed during her residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, a place closely connected to Ken Price, who worked there in the 1970s – creating a subtle dialogue between the two exhibitions at PoMo.

The exhibition also features two new site‑specific video installations by artist and Emmy‑winning filmmaker Kate Kunath, who accompanied Opie on her travels. Kunath’s films offer a poetic, humorous and intimate look at Opie’s working process, while questioning how observation shapes what we perceive.

Mountains Don’t Know Their Names is ultimately an exhibition about presence: about the meeting between people and landscape, and our urge to give meaning, stories and names to places that exist entirely beyond us. Produced by PoMo in close collaboration with Catherine Opie, this is her first major solo exhibition in Central Norway.

The artist

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio, USA) is widely regarded as one of the leading photographers of her generation, often documenting the dynamics of American culture and identity. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She is Professor Emerita and former Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a professor of photography from 2001 to 2023

For over thirty years, Catherine Opie has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles' freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. In 2018 Opie debuted her first film, The Modernist, a dystopic view of Los Angeles, a city that has figured prominently in her work over the years. Her complex and diverse body of work is political, personal, and highly aesthetic – the formal, conceptual, and documentary are always at play.

This year, Opie has had several major institutional solo exhibitions throughout Europe at Fridericianum, Kassel; National Portrait Gallery, London; and Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. She has had several other institutional solo exhibitions, including at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2024), Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo (2017), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006). Her works have also been shown in numerous international group exhibitions, including at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2021), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016). Opie has also collaborated on iconic campaigns with celebrated fashion brands such as Gucci (2025) and Prada (2022). Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles.