Noah Alveberg works where current becomes form. Volcanic iron oxide gathered from Snæfellsjökull, cinnabar from the hydrothermal deposits of Monte Amiata, charcoal and malachite bring different histories of transformation to cotton paper. Pigment is ground, suspended, thrown and poured; water spreads, particles settle, the paper absorbs and redirects. The hand initiates movements it cannot wholly command. These substances carry more than colour: they give the image weight, resistance and duration. Landscape enters the work both as an image and as the matter from which an image is made.
Across drawing, painting and photocollage, the practice unfolds as a cosmology of embodiment. Bodies continue as terrain; animal markings become script; a mountain acquires the intimacy of anatomy. Photographic space is crossed by substances that remain insistently on its surface, making the eye negotiate depicted depth and material presence at once. In Da’at, a female face emerges from the scintillae of a breaking wave without becoming separable from its turbulence. Recognition changes the entire field: what appeared to be weather acquires a gaze. The figure does not replace its ground. It makes the ground newly visible.
The great cats condense this relation. Their stripes and rosettes articulate a body without enclosing it in a continuous outline. Charcoal intervals give the mineral wash a musculature; the wash gives the marks a continuity they do not possess alone. Mark and flow produce each other. Form is neither the enemy of the current nor its inert remainder: it is how movement becomes legible. Alveberg’s freediving and hunting in Saltstraumen give this question a lived geography. The narrows concentrate the tide; the body must find its passage. What matters is how a structure can hold intensity without extinguishing it.
This emphasis on emergence finds an affinity in Heinrich Zimmer’s account of “expanding form” in Indian sculpture: the carved figure encountered as an event still taking place. Alveberg approaches the relation from the other direction, letting liquid-borne mineral become a durable image that retains the force of its formation. The work shares process art’s attention to material behaviour, but here the pour also becomes the condition of a figure’s arrival. Emanation names this passage into articulation, not an escape from matter. The image holds the crossing open.
A circle recurs—often Galileo’s. Works including Giug. D. 25 and Lugl. D. 7 take their titles from dated observations published in his 1613 sunspot treatise, in which dark, changing marks challenged an ideal of celestial perfection. In Alveberg’s images, the spotted body meets the spotted star. Letters devised to index solar phenomena migrate onto fur; rosettes and sunspots become a shared script without losing their different origins. The diagram is neither rejected nor allowed the last word. It enters the field it was meant to describe. The blemish becomes a means of recognition.
Elsewhere, circles condense into discs, source-points and apertures. Dark nodes interrupt radiant surfaces; narrow columns cross bodies, water and sky. These marks do not provide a key that decodes the image. They reorganize its relations. A single interruption can bind disparate spaces together while leaving something irreducibly opaque at their junction. Concealment is productive here: the image acquires an interior through what it cannot fully disclose.
Reflection makes that interior dependent on an encounter. Silver leaf over red bole catches changing light; dark, glossy passages alternately withhold the image and return the room. In the three-metre-high Das Geviert, an ellipsoid flecked with lapis lazuli interrupts a landscape turned upright. Artemis and Apollo are inscribed above. The title invokes Heidegger’s fourfold—earth, sky, mortals and divinities—but the gathering is renewed by an ordinary event: someone passes, light shifts, another body enters the surface. The viewer is no longer simply outside the work, looking in. Looking becomes one of the relations the work holds.
Underlying the practice is a question of self-relation: how awareness becomes legible to itself through forms that both reveal and veil it. Recurring divisions between witness and embodied figure give this question its psychic and erotic charge. The feminine figure can cease to be what is looked at and become the presence through which the image is experienced. Soul, in this work, names neither an invisible substance nor a flight from the body, but the body’s relation to itself through the world. Recognition does not resolve that relation into transparency. The form is the clearing: a place where something becomes legible without ceasing to exceed its image.
CV
DOB: 1990
Based in: Oslo, Norway
Education
BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, London | 2009–2012
Drawing studies under Guro Giske | 2004–2006
Solo Exhibitions
KILDE, Fondahuset/Kunst & Kaos, Røros | 2026
Gjengangere: Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon, Galleri A-minor, Oslo | 2015
Sol, Galleri A, Oslo | 2012
DESCENT, Galleri A, Oslo | 2010
Group Exhibitions (Selected)
Juleutstilling Vinter, Fineart, Oslo | 2022
Syndere i Sommersol – Kollektiv Sommerutstilling, Fineart, Oslo | 2018
A-Laget UTVALG Sommer, Galleri A, Oslo | 2018
A-Laget UTVALG Jul, Galleri A, Oslo | 2017
Finearts Juleutstilling, Fineart, Oslo | 2012
A-Laget UTVALG Julen, Galleri A, Oslo | 2012
Finearts Juleutstilling, Fineart, Oslo | 2011
A-Laget UTVALG Julen, Galleri A, Oslo | 2011
A-Laget UTVALG Sommer, Galleri A, Oslo | 2011
A-Laget UTVALG Vinter, Galleri A, Oslo | 2010
A-Laget UTVALG Sommer, Galleri A, Oslo | 2010
A-Laget UTVALG, Galleri A, Oslo | 2009
Galleri Nordstrand, Oslo | 2008
Collections (Selected)
Swedbank FIRST Securities | 2010
NHO – Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise | 2009
Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services | 2009
iSurvey – Offshore Surveyors | 2008
Film & Media
Contributing Artist – LOOK UP—The Science of Cultural Evolution (2024)
Directed by Nini Myhrvold & Dr. Espen Folmo
Multi-award-winning animated documentary exploring cultural and psychological evolution. Alveberg contributed three original artworks featured throughout the film. LOOK UP received Best Feature Documentary at the Cannes World Film Festival, London Movie Awards, and Hollywood Gold Awards, among numerous international recognitions.
Talks & Presentations
“Yoga as an Instrument for Self-Regulation”
The Oslo Body Psychotherapy Conference (OsloMet) | October 05, 2024
Workshop exploring the relationship between breath, movement, and the autonomic nervous system. Focus on exhalation and forward bends as tools for state regulation, with real-time HRV tracking through pulse bands.
“The Anatomy of the Subtle Body”
International Summer University, Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) | August 19, 2023– A Comparative Exploration of Reich’s Seven Segments and the Seven Chakras.