The Stratford Gallery is proud to present The Lightness and The Dark, a new solo exhibition by celebrated Norwegian painter Kristin Vestgard. Opening on Saturday 27th September 2025, the exhibition brings together a powerful new body of work that deepens Vestgard’s ongoing exploration of presence, solitude, and the quiet complexity of the human condition.

In March 2025, the gallery visited Vestgard in her home town of Åsgårdstrand, a small coastal settlement known for its rich artistic heritage. It was here that Edvard Munch painted The Scream, and where Vestgard continues the town’s creative lineage in a profoundly different, though equally evocative, visual language.

Her paintings depict enigmatic female figures, often standing alone, their forms dissolving into soft yet assertive brushwork. These figures are neither portraits nor characters—they are atmospheres in themselves, suspended in open spaces suffused with the peculiar luminosity of the Nordic light. The effect is both gentle and arresting: a poised ambiguity between clarity and concealment, hope and melancholy, lightness and dark.

This new collection evokes the rare and shifting light of the midnight sun, casting its glow across stillness and silence. The viewer is invited to dwell in the same expansive inner space as Vestgard’s figures—to feel, rather than to read, the emotional charge of their presence.

The Lightness and The Dark marks Kristin Vestgard’s first major solo exhibition with The Stratford Gallery and reaffirms her position as one of Scandinavia’s most distinctive and poetic contemporary painters.

The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday 27th September 2025, 3pm at The Stratford Gallery, Broadway, and will run until late October.

Kristin Vestgard will be in attendance at the opening.