The gateway to the world has opened again

The confusion with the international abbreviation for postmodernism is accepted, even if the project has little in common with the wildly quoting, eclectic art form. On the contrary: there are clear goals and clear messages. The third largest city of Norway is to be transformed into a cultural metropolis.

When converting the striking corner building from 1911, a new theater was added in the back, which shares the restaurant with the Pomo. Suddenly the internationally operating Kunsthalle, the municipal museum and the National Museum for Applied Arts have grown in just a few minutes’ walk. According to hope, which should also attract them more attention.

In order to get visitors to come and also remain in the port city of more than seven train hours from Oslo, the five-star Hotel Brittania with its hundred rooms is available on the other side of the street from Pomo. The post office architect Karl Norum also built it almost a decades and a half earlier-at that time as a neighborhood for the salmon fishermen arriving from the USA and Great Britain.

While the Brittania continues to indulge in the Grandhotel-Schick, the Pomo occurs with the coolness of a contemporary museum, which at least in the former switch hall shows reverence: the stucco on the columns was finely restored, the copper sign with the names of the victims of the second World War II and Terrazzo again on the ground. Like gigantic metal worms, the sculptures of Franz West are curling on it.

A wild game of colors begins on the edges. The bookshop presents itself up to the range of offers in Quietsch-Pink, the steel stairs in a screaming orange. Here the Paris interior designer India Mahdavi left her handwriting, inspired by the colorful painting of Norwegian wooden houses. The Pomo is her first museum project after she previously equipped hotels, bars, clubs and received the award designer of the year for the scenography of the Pierre Bonnard exhibition in Melbourne 2023.

The collector couple Monica and Ole Robert Reitan directly commissioned the Iranian-French designer because the Pomo is her project. The two financed the renovation of the former post office, which the Oslo architect Erik Langdalen looked after, as well as the expansion to the theater; The Hotel Britannia owns them. You describe the museum as a realization of your personal dream as an art lover. Behind it may also be interested in the development of further properties.

In Trondheim, the success story of the multi -billion dollar family company began, a retail chain that now maintains branches in the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. With the Pomo after the handover of the art silo in Kristiansand last summer, the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo and the nearby Henie Onstad Kunstzentrum opened another private museum that testifies to the prosperity in the richest country in the world.

The line between the museum and the private collection is not entirely clear. Monica Reitan is also the chair and decides on purchases for the Pomo. The first position shows something of everything. There are works from the still young inventory of the museum, which, as a role model function, wants to make 60 percent of his acquisitions among artists. Work from Isa Genzken or the cycle of colored Munch wood cuts comes from family ownership. In addition, large houses sent loans to support. The photographs of Irving Penn come from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Warhol’s “Mao” from the Copenhagen Louisiana Museum.

The great party leader in Trondheim looks at pictures by the Chinese painter Cui Jie, who satirizes the almost shouting building growth in his homeland. The comparison of Piranese “Carceri” with the scratched metallic areas of Anne Imhof and her glass panes, which graffitos are sprayed on is similarly surprising. Both show confusing levels.

The Danish curator Rasmus Thor Christensen has set up a varied course with top -class work by Louise Bourgeois to James Lee Byers, from Fischli & Weiss to Sandra Mujinga. What connects to the top topic “Postcards from the future” does not necessarily make sense except for the oversized enlarged postcards by Katharina Fritsch.

So much is certain: it should have to do with the topic of post office that was a goal of the turn of the turn of the century. Due to the transformation into a museum, it has opened again.