Market Art Fair

Material Gestures and Photographic Fields: Galleri Riis at Market Art Fair 2025

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Courtesy of Galleri Riis and Eline Mugaas

Bringing together the tactile formalism of Éva Mag and the layered visual vocabularies of Eline Mugaas, Galleri Riis presents a dialogue between sculpture and photography that navigates themes of embodiment, perception, and the fluid boundaries of medium and memory.

Founded in 1972 in Trondheim, Norway by Inger and Andreas L. Riis, Galleri Riis has been based in Oslo since 1980, today under the ownership of Espen Ryvarden and Kristin Elisabeth Bråten. Ahead of their presentation at Market Art Fair 2025 the gallery has put together a duo-exhibition featuring Norwegian artist Eline Mugaas, and Swedish-Romanian Éva Mag.

  • Photo by Emma Krantz. Courtesy of Skissernas Museum

Eline Mugaas, primarily known for her work within an extended field of photography, has recently made exhibitions combining film, sculpture and photography in complex and elegant installations.  Primarily known for her photographs, Eline Mugaas was educated at The Cooper Union in New York and spent several years doing photographic and scenography commissions in the city before returning to Norway in the end of the 90s. Her most recent works move in an extended field of photography, and combine film, sculpture and photography in installations, connecting to her concerns regarding light, texture, space and place in a broad sense.

Her ideas span a variety of interests, and her photographs are concerned with light, texture, space and place in a broad sense. Images can be from domestic interiors or urban spaces, as well as antique art or sourced from various printed matter like old photography manuals. Mugaas depicts everyday motifs with a still-life quality that borders on the painterly. There is a forthrightness and immediacy in the depictions, and the style of execution is sensual.

  • Courtesy of Galleri Riis and Eline Mugaas
  • Courtesy of Galleri Riis and Eline Mugaas

Her work will occupy the walls of Galleri Riis booth, with a variety of photographic works, in various formats and sizes, both framed and unframed, wallpapered and collaged directly on the wall. These works will interact with, and create the backdrop for, a group of three welded and painted aluminum sculptures, 1–5 meters tall, by Éva Mag.

 

  • Photo by Märta Thisner. Courtesy of Galleri Riis and Éva Mag
  • Photo by Sofia Johansson. Courtesy of Galleri Riis and Éva Mag

Éva Mag was born 1979 in Miercurea-Ciuic, Transylvania. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Stockholm, where she received her artistic education at the Royal Institute of Art. Mag works with narratives about the body, both the human and the sculptural, and in particular its amorphous forms. Her practice also includes an archive of the working process, and she is engaged with the social aspects of art, such as workshops, choreography, dance and performance.

Over the last years, Mag’s focus has been performance, scenography and site-specific installations comprising textiles, clay and steel. In 2024, she completed a public art project for Stockholm Konst in Skärholmen, with monumental welded and brightly painted sculptures in aluminium, inspired by her ongoing work with textile collages.