Rønning and Hagen are often referred to as the artists' artists; central to a trend in contemporary art in recent years where the media's own tactility and materiality are highlighted. In many ways, both artists create images that point to themselves as images. Photographs always have an effect of reality as a window onto the world, but Rønning and Hagen, however, set up obstacles in the viewer's way that cause us to stumble at the edge of the image. Through various means, they draw the viewer's gaze towards the photograph's surface in order to almost evoke the photograph as a material presence in the face of the viewer. In an image-hungry contemporary culture, where photography is at the same time everywhere and redundant, the artists take pointed positions. Rønning and Hagen's pictures are in many ways self-explanatory, they are pictures about seeing, and about being in the act of seeing.

For a number of years, Stein Rønning has consistently and rigorously explored the relationship between photography and object, depiction and the depicted. Rønning's method springs from his sculpture background, and is based on precise assemblies of simple, handmade wooden boxes. The boxes are photographed against a neutral background, processed digitally and printed in various sizes and techniques. The photographs mirror each other in horizontal and vertical constellations in the skylight hall, and by, for example, tilting the images outwards in the picture frame or rotating them 90 degrees, he focuses on the image's object character. The repetition in Rønning's approach means that, in a way, we always see the same picture. In Rønning's pictures, the spatial and sculptural are condensed into a photographic and representative surface, in an attempt to manifest what is really present rather than what is represented in the picture. This is how Rønning's work appears as pure, physical presence in the face of the viewer.
Stein Rønning (b. 1953) lives and works in Oslo and has for a number of years been active as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo/KhiO and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen/KHiB. Parallel to the exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Rønning exhibits at Galleri Riis in Oslo. He has had a number of exhibitions in recent years, including at Galleri D.O.R. in Brussels, MOLAF in Bergen, Trondhjems Kunstforening, Bomuldfabriken in Arendal, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and the Carnegie Art Award.