Torbjørn Rødland creates photographic works that directly address their audience while generating a variety of intellectual and emotional moods. His artwork frequently combines romanticism, love for the natural environment, comedy, criticality, and curiosity in the same image. Rødland also places a strong emphasis on the formal aspects of his images, pushing the genre toward forms of visual expression more typically connected with painting and creating connections between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century methods of image creation found in social media and advertising. Rødland frequently draws inspiration from non-photographic images that he develops into actual photographic subjects. Through his representation of very sensory elements, he creates situations meant to elicit a psychological response. The employment of film-based cameras and chemical darkroom processes by the artist is what creates the physicality in the piece.
Torbjørn Rødland has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Contemporary Austin, TX USA; a traveling exhibition produced as a collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA. He had notable group exhibitions at the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; and Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.
His work is in the permanent collections of museums including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, NY USA; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; Malmö Art Museum, Bergen, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY USA.
