Fredrik Raddum has tied a woman’s leg in a knot. A real one, just below the knee, and she stands there with her chin up and her eyes shut like it happens every Tuesday.
The Norwegian sculptor’s new show, Arme og Ben (Arms and Legs), is at Hans Alf Gallery in Copenhagen, and almost every body in it has stopped cooperating. Small figures stand on plinths with an arm or a leg tied off. On the walls, arms, legs, hands and feet are braided into tight clumps, toes poking out of the weave.
One title, two countries
The best joke is in the name. In Danish, doing something with arms and legs means going all in. In Norwegian, the same phrase means a pile of limbs, a mess.
A Norwegian artist, a Danish gallery, and a roomful of sculptures that mean both at once.
In DanishAll in. Whole body, full effort.
In NorwegianA tangle. Limbs everywhere, nobody in charge.
The knots we carry
Raddum’s people wear their knots calmly. Nobody panics, and nobody tries to untie anything. A bronze man in red shoes tips his head back like his bus is very late.
The bodies are cartoon simple and brightly painted, so the problem has nowhere to hide.
Tangled Couple hold each other so tightly you lose track of whose arms are whose. Embrace or wrestling hold? We changed our minds three times.
And then, a bird
An enormous bird stands on the gallery floor with a ghost costume in its beak, the empty sheet hanging limp.
The gallery reads it as the ghosts we try to hide. We read it as Halloween, settled: someone got unmasked, and whoever was under there got away!
Funny first, serious second
Raddum, born in 1973, lives and works in Oslo and has been exhibiting since 1999. His work is in the Statens Museum for Kunst and ARoS, and his 2024 show was called Lint in the Navel of the World, which might be our favorite exhibition title in years!
The method holds: it looks like a cartoon, then won’t let you off the hook. This time the color comes roaring back. Our one gripe is scale. In the room the small figures get lost, so get close.
See it
Arme og Ben runs through November 24, 2026 at Hans Alf Gallery, Holbergsgade 8, Copenhagen. The gallery has shown Raddum for over a decade and is the place to ask about collecting a piece. New work turns up on Instagram at @fredradd.
More like this: the most surreal art we’ve featured, Alex Chinneck’s bent buildings and giant walking sneaker-legs.
Via Inspiration Grid. Photos courtesy of Hans Alf Gallery.
