The making of Kunstsilo, Norway’s newest art museum: ‘A landmark building of the 20th century taking on new life to become one of the landmark buildings of the 21st’

The city of Kristiansand boasts the most popular visitor attraction in all of Norway: a zoo and amusement park called Dyreparken. As of May this year, it also has a world-class art museum.

‘The path getting here wasn’t simple,’ says Reidar Fuglestad, Kunstsilo’s CEO. ‘But we’re delighted to have now opened the doors to our awe-inspiring building.’

Kunstsilo is a new museum that is home to the Tangen Collection, regarded by many as the world’s most important collection of Nordic modern art. This is a holding of more than 5,000 works, by the likes of Lars-Gunnar Nordström, the Finnish follower of the Concrete art movement; Reidar Aulie, the socially engaged Norwegian painter; his compatriot, Anna-Eva Bergman, who produced mysterious abstractions; and Denmark’s Asger Jorn, co-founder of the CoBrA movement.

The vast majority of works in the collection were made between 1910 and 1990 — something Fuglestad describes as ‘fitting’, because ‘the story of Kunstsilo begins in the early part of that period’.

Norway’s population grew steadily at the start of the 20th century. Grain was being imported from countries such as the USA, Argentina and Russia to feed it — much of it via Kristiansand, one of the country’s shipping hubs. In 1935, a huge silo structure was built on the island of Odderøya, just south of the city. It had the capacity to store 15,000 tons of grain. This grain was dispatched to mills to be ground into flour, which in turn was used to make bread.

Designed by two young Norwegian architects, Arne Korsmo and Sverre Aasland, the building was a prime example of the then fashionable style of Functionalism. As its name suggests, that style prioritised function over form. The building still managed to possess a certain beauty, however, not least because of its striking cylindrical towers (where the grain was stored).

The silo ceased operation in the early 2000s, remaining vacant for a number of years thereafter, until the idea came to convert it into a museum — the museum that has just opened. ‘Kunstsilo’ was chosen as its name because it suggested the building’s past and present simultaneously: its literal translation is ‘art silo’.

‘This is a special story,’ says Fuglestad. ‘One of Kristiansand’s landmark buildings of the 20th century taking on new life to, hopefully, become one of its landmark buildings of the 21st.’

The aim is for Kunstsilo to receive 150,000 visitors per annum — a figure already surpassed in its opening year after just five months. Fuglestad isn’t resting on any laurels, though. He’s currently in talks with the ferry and cruise operators who use Kristiansand’s port, with a view to bringing their passengers to the museum.

Kunstsilo’s debut exhibition, Passions of the North, occupies most of the building and is essentially an introduction to the Tangen Collection, showcasing 600 of its works. Among the highlights is Aulie’s picture Tivoli (1935), a slightly eerie scene of people gathered at an Oslo fairground. Near to where this hangs is a door to a room called the S-Lab, which contains an immersive digital reproduction of the same painting, projected onto its four walls.

The figures are now animated, with a soundtrack accompanying their movements: a mix of fairground chatter, loud-speaker announcements, and a band playing. Other pictures from the collection will receive the S-Lab treatment in the months and years ahead.

The Tangen Collection owes its existence to Nicolai Tangen, 58, a Kristiansand-born investment banker who today serves as CEO of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (valued at $1.7 trillion).

His father worked in shipping, and his mother in cultural conservation, the latter helping stoke an interest in the visual arts. Tangen’s collecting journey began in the 1990s, at the same time as he was forging a successful financial career in London. What began as a ‘flirtation’, he says, went on to become a ‘kind of obsession’.

His preference was for Nordic works, largely because that was the art he knew best. In 2003, he took a two-year sabbatical to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he wrote his master’s thesis on the printmaker Rolf Nesch. Nesch’s works duly occupy a significant place in both Passions of the North and the Tangen Collection as a whole.

Tangen donated the collection to his home town in 2015, with the idea of transforming Kristiansand’s vacant silo building to house it. The idea was well received by the city council, and after a competition involving 101 architectural firms, a practice called Mestres Wåge Arquitectes was chosen to take on the museum design (with assistance from two other firms, Mendoza Partida and BAX Studio).

In the words of the jury, chaired by Kristiansand’s mayor at the time, Harald Furre, this submission combined ‘architectural self-assurance with humble respect for the silo building and its newly assigned task’.

The cylindrical towers remain a key feature of the structure visually, albeit not practically. Visitors enter via a vast ground-level atrium, which is visible from a landing on each of the upper floors. There are 25 galleries, spread over the first, second and third storeys.

Fuglestad joined as CEO in 2017, having previously held the same role at Dyreparken. ‘Since we opened, the reception has been positive,’ he says. ‘The people of Kristiansand [Norway’s sixth-largest city] are seeing that Kunstsilo has international pull, and bears comparison with the big museums in Oslo.’

Public approval wasn’t always so forthcoming, however. ‘With projects like this, it’s natural to encounter resistance,’ says Fuglestad. ‘People saying the money should have been spent on other things — on schools, hospitals and so on. Views on Kunstsilo were polarised in Kristiansand for many years.’

The project cost 710 million Norwegian kroner (roughly $66 million), with funding coming from a range of sources. Most telling in terms of public opinion was the fact that Tangen contributed 30 per cent of the cost, while 50 per cent came from the public purse. Furre, as mayor, signed off on that financial arrangement, something widely cited as a reason for his failure to win re-election in 2019.

The situation was complicated by the decision for Kunstsilo to house and administer not just the Tangen Collection but also the 1,700 works in the Sørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU). A longstanding public institution, located at premises elsewhere in Kristiansand, SKMU showed art and crafts made by figures from the city and the wider region of Agder. It is now part of Kunstsilo.

‘Kristiansand is a small place, with just 120,000 inhabitants,’ says Fuglestad. ‘So there was never any peace from the noises against Kunstsilo. Everywhere I went, people would confront me about it: in the street, in the shops, in the mountain cabin when I went skiing. It was a tough time. But you need to be patient, stubborn, and stay true to what you believe in. I like to think that the city is now reaping the rewards of that.’

With the museum successfully open, Fuglestad will stand down from his post in December. His successor has been announced as Maria Mediaas Jørstad, currently the director of the Nordic Culture Fund. (Tangen, for his part, occupies a spot on the board of directors.)

Odderøya is connected to the mainland by a series of bridges, and the northern section of the island in particular (where Kunstilo is found) is pretty much considered part of the city. Next door to the museum are the Kilden performing arts centre, which opened in 2012, and the Knuden arts hub for children. It’s hoped that the area will grow into a cultural quarter.

As for the offerings inside Kunstsilo, there will be concerts, talks, book launches and, of course, art. Passions of the North originally occupied the entire building, but part of it has come down to make way for a temporary exhibition curated by the British artist Edmund de Waal. Called Playing with Fire, it features de Waal’s works alongside a selection of pieces by the famed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto.

Going forward, there promises to be flexibility in the programming, but the broad plan is to put on eight temporary exhibitions or displays a year — all of them with some sort of link to the Tangen Collection (which includes 66 works by Salto) or the collection previously held at SKMU.

On the evidence of Passions of the North, Nordic artists of the 20th century typically retained the spirit and subject matter of their home region, while also being plugged into art trends from the wider world, such as Surrealism and Pop.

Probably the most eye-catching work in the Tangen Collection is Marianne Heske’s conceptual piece, Gjerdeløa (1980), which is on permanent view on the fourth floor. It consists of a 350-year-old hay barn, which the artist took from a mountainside in the Sunnmøre region of north-west Norway and transported by van to show at the 1980 Biennale de Paris at the Pompidou Centre. It was seen by 140,000 people, before being returned to Norway by the same van.

‘I believe the aim should be for Kunstsilo to take up a position as the leader in the field for Nordic modernism,’ Fuglestad says. ‘By which I mean, the principal venue for showing and discussing it. This art has received relatively little attention over the years, but I think interest is growing, and we want to drive that change.’

Visit kunstsilo.no for further information. Passions of the North continues, in modified form, until 20 April 2025. Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto runs until 2 March 2025