Vanessa Baird has distinguished herself as one of the strongest and most uncompromising voices in contemporary Norwegian art.

This winter the public will be able to view her important and critically acclaimed work You are something else in Bergen.

In 2013 Vanessa Baird’s work To everything there is a season, commissioned for the bombed Oslo government district Regjeringskvartalet, was rejected by the Norwegian authorities on the grounds that it might rekindle reactions of anxiety and grief in its employees. This caused a heated debate in the media and the work quickly became one of the Norway’s most discussed work of art in recent times. In 2015 Baird was awarded Norway’s largest art prize, Lorck Schives kunstpris, for her work I dont want to be anywhere, but here I am.

You are something else will be shown at KODE. The work received considerable attention and rave reviews when it was exhibited in Kunstnernes Hus in autumn 2017. Baird also received many reviews when it was presented at The Armory Show in New York this year.

You are something else is a continuous visual narrative covering 38 five meter high paper panels drawn in pastels. Through her distinctive fabulating idiom Baird weaves together escapes across the ocean, visual popular culture and everyday life, and the public is engulfed in a dramatic, grotesque and poetic tale of our times.