Marius Engh (b. 1974) lives and works in Oslo. His works have been exhibited at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz, Tenerife; Preus Museum, Horten; Drammens Museum, Drammen; Power Station of Art, Shanghai, and to be found in collections like: The National Museum of Art, Oslo; Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo; KORO - Public Art Norway, Oslo; KODE Museums, Bergen; Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger; Telenor Corporate Collection, Oslo; The City of Oslo Art Collection; JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Deka Bank, Frankfurt am Main; Fondazione Mora Grecco, Naples.
Recent and ongoing exhibitions are “The Sign of Four” at Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo (2025); “War is Peace?”, The Nobel Peace Center, Oslo (2025-2026); The National Museum of Art, permanent exhibition, Oslo and the public art commission “Hermopolis”, KORO / Tolldirektoratet, Oslo (2020), and upcoming exhibition “Sock & Buskin” where his project space Hermetiske Skygger is visiting Jane at K.O.S A - Krutthuset Oslo in September 2026.
Thyra Dragseth (b. 1993) is a Norwegian visual artist. She lives and works between Lisbon and Oslo and holds an MFA from the National Academy of Art in Oslo. Dragseth works multidisciplinarily with photography, film, sound, text, and installation. Her works often arise from her own lived experiences and perception, becoming pieces of translated reality. Dragseth co-initiated the discursive curatorial project Lars Lisboa (2021-2023), hosting events and exhibitions. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: SWAB Art Fair Barcelona (2025); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2025); K4, Oslo (2025); Pachinko, Oslo (2024); OSTRA Practice, Lisbon (2024); Sol Nexø, Bornholm (2023); and MELK Gallery, Oslo (2021). Dragseth is nominated for the Sparebanken Norge Kunstnerpris 2026 (Agder), in collaboration with Kunstsiloen, Kristiansand, where she will exhibit new works in September 2026.
MELK is excited to present two new exhibitions by Marius Engh and Thyra Dragseth titled Stilbon and Is your mother still your mother after you fall asleep?.
We hope to see you at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00 on Friday, April 10.
Bringing together the sculptural investigations of Marius Engh and the photographic excavations of Thyra Dragseth, these two exhibitions unfold as a dialogue between material memory and lived experience, between what is unearthed and what is remembered. Across distinct practices, both artists engage in acts of retrieval of histories, images, and traces approaching the past not as something fixed, but as something continuously reconfigured through movement, manipulation, and reflection.
Engh’s sculptural works emerge from journeys through landscapes marked by cultural residue, where fragments of art history and archaeology are reassembled into speculative constellations. Dragseth, by contrast, turns inward, mining the intimate archive of her own family to expose the instability of personal narratives. Yet in both, the gesture is similar: a probing of the human condition as it is embedded in objects, images, and the spaces between them.
Together, their works form a passage of searching across geographies and generations where meaning is neither given nor resolved but suspended. What surfaces is a shared sensibility attuned to the fragile boundary between visibility and obscurity, where the act of looking becomes both an inquiry and a form of reconstruction.
Stilbon
Marius Engh is a visual artist working with sculpture in its extended field. He is interested in art history and in how its semiotics can be studied through rereading and speculation. He composes his work with materials drawn from hands-on experiences of places, which serve as significant components of his research into the human spirit and condition embedded in artefacts. Recently, for this exhibition, he has been traveling highways and hiking mountain tops in search of antiquities in Greece, Italy and France. The exhibition is also an intermezzo and meditation on an upcoming wandering from Prague to Paris, which is partly a conclusion and revisit to his «Bohemia» project, which started in the historical mining town Jáchymov, Czech Republic, in 2018.
Is your mother still your mother after you fall asleep?
There is what we see, and then there is what we can’t see in Thyra Dragseth’s new exhibition.
Dragseth has stuck her hand into a wasp’s nest: her own family history. From a small tin can, she has exposed negatives from her grandmother’s and her parents’ personal archive, developing them into large prints and tiny series mounted with tape in rough aluminium frames. Rather than showing history as a linear, or even subjective narrative, Dragseth’s photographic collages of both inherited and self-experienced material let us look at the past as a series of fragmented clashes.
In her works, the documenting properties of photography are both enhanced and repressed. What we see is the result of a transparent, manipulative process: negatives cut, taped, scratched, exposed and enlarged. Moments and subjects from distant times and point of views, forced together in a twisted narrative, balance on the edge between confession and concealment. Several of the found images reveal scenes from a ship where Dragseth's grandfather worked as a ship's mechanic, and where his wife (Dragseth’s grandmother) went along two times. They left their two little boys at home for several years, to earn money and experience the world, each other, and life at sea. As a retold story it is difficult to grasp. As developed pictures, however, it is possible to approach some sort of understanding, if not outright identification.
We find ourselves in this room of possibilities and impossibilities, with an intimate distance that lets us identify with both child and adult at the same time. To moralise is not in her interest. Rather, her work allows us – and herself – to face our own humanity; our drives and ambitions, our life force, our vulnerability. Dragseth walks with us to the limit, to the edge that simultaneously connects and separates the sublime and the catastrophic, to show us the aesthetics of transgression.
MELK is supported by Arts Council Norway
The exhibition is supported by Kulturrådet, Fond for Lyd og Bilde, Norsk Fotografisk Fond, and Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.
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