Klara Sofie Ludvigsen (b. 1983) lives and works in Bergen. She has a bachelor's degree from Kent Institute of Art and Design and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Ludvigsen works with analogue processes and explores how improvisation can take a large part in the photographic practice. She has exhibited at Tag Team Studio (NO), Harbinger Projectspace (IS), Galleri Espolin (NO), among others, and has participated in juried group shows such as Høstutstillingen, Vårutstillingen and Vestlandsutstillingen.
We are excited to start our spring season with a solo presentation of new works by Klara Sofie Ludvigsen. Her first solo exhibition at MELK.
We hope to see you at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00 on Friday, February 20.
“The present can be so intense, blinking in your face so brightly, that it dazzles you and it becomes hard to see.”
An encounter with death can sharpen perception and at the same time reveal the impossibility of ever being fully aware. Neon notid by Klara Sofie Ludvigsen emerged from the artist’s own confrontation with personal loss and the frustration of never being able to fully perceive the whole picture. Rather than resignation, Ludvigsen translates absence, fragility, and fleeting presence into a visual and sensory experience. The work presented here refuses narrative, instead inviting viewers into a vivid, although fragmented, state of presence.
The exhibition is anchored in analogue large-format photography. Ludvigsen’s process is both precise and experimental: while she embraces traditional photographic techniques, she approaches the darkroom as a site of improvisation, play, and controlled disturbance. Working intuitively, she layers motifs, collages negatives, and allows the chemical, optical, and procedural properties of photography to intervene. In doing so, she intentionally disrupts neatness, breaking from photography’s traditional control and making space for surprise.
This approach extends into the physical exhibition space. Photographic prints are combined with glass elements, resting atop images to refract, obscure, and add color. These installations challenge the viewer’s usual mode of looking. Images are no longer immediate or easily consumable; rather, they demand time, attention, and bodily engagement. The work slows perception, cultivating a sensory encounter that mirrors the artist’s own process.
The exhibition also foregrounds the physicality of photography. Collaged negatives and experimental enlargements remind the viewer of the materiality of the medium. Photography involves light, paper, and chemical processes, and has the capacity to engage the body as much as the eye. The works here invite bodily presence as well as intellectual reflection.
Neon notid ultimately challenges comfort and closure. It disturbs photography, perception, and the ease with which viewers approach images. Yet within this disturbance lies an invitation to linger in the feeling of not knowing, and to encounter the world, and one’s own life, in ways that are subtle, sensory, and profoundly human.
–Heather Jones
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