THE PREGNANT VIRGIN by Torbjørn Rødland

Mack, 2023
8.3 × 10.6 in
112 pages
Digital offset printing
Hardcover with perfect binding
Deboss
First edition

“Oh, I’m grateful whenever specific images stay with people, when they keep mulling them over—either during daytime, or in dreams at night. It’s not so hard for people to feel invited in if the artist pushes on and slightly penetrates familiar surfaces. It’s rewarding when viewers see themselves in the images. A woman who had just lost her father teared up in front of ‘Comb Over.’” 

—Interview with Torbjørn Rødland by Lara Konrad for collecteurs

The title of this new book from renowned photographer and book-maker Torbjørn Rødland suggests that the artist is looking for the divine in his sitters. If the child in Madonna and child paintings symbolises truth, then the pregnant virgin might represent a temporarily concealed truth–one masked or hidden behind compromised shells and failing bodies, young and old. The photographs in this arresting new collection negotiate surface and interiority and welcome tensions between contingent reality and archetypes, often uncannily recalling day-to-day life in intensely physical and opaquely allusive scenes.

Constructed with characteristic precision and an instinct for surrealism and surprise, this sequence feeds on symbolism and visual texture in a sense reminiscent of classic ‘art’ photography or religious painting, but its self-conscious edge gives it a distinct and hard-to-fathom charge. With The Pregnant Virgin, Rødland explores analogue photography in dialogue both with online digital culture and visual art from before photography existed as a stable medium.