Eivind Aadland’s collection of contemporary art contains important pieces by some of the most prominent and interesting international artists working today. Ranging from more established contemporary masters like Wolfgang Tillmans or Christopher Wool, to young emerging names like Anna Zacharoff and Avery Singer. What is apparent across his collection is the sensitivity and aesthetic coherence of his approach to the work he acquires. Abstraction - and a kind of serial, often graphic, and at times almost musical sensibility - runs through works on paper, painting, print, sculpture and photography. From Tomma Abts delicate drawing in pencil and felt pen, through Tauba Auerbach’s dense geometric designs, to Michael Krebber's enigmatic, lyrical compositions. Space and form - often at their most pared down and simple - recur throughout the works, many of which recall a kind of score or text. In fact fragments of text appear in some of the works - by Johannes Wohnseifer and Christopher Wool for example - and coupled with the modesty of many of the works materials and gesture - sheets of paper, simple signs and symbols, marks and graphic forms – they take on a dynamic, almost performative quality. In fact a number of them feel like they might have been performed, or that they should be ‘read’ in a way: visually, emotionally, intellectually, intuitively. Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev’s work is exemplary here - painting as a kind of process or performance; one that ends up fixed on the canvas but still resonating with the relative speed of its making, the gestures, the accidents, the unlikely tools and the mundane domestic references, all animated through the wit and intelligence of their operation; always uncertain, unstable, in play. In a kind of contrast, perhaps, are two works by Isa Genzken, one of the most important and celebrated contemporary artists working today. Aadland has two of her iconic concrete receivers – embryonic ‘radios’ tuned to the dumb materiality of their own substance. A simple block with aerials, they are like an image of an object - a fossil, surrogate, prototype or ghost. These beautiful blanks are both deaf and mute, but are tuned to the vibrations of another kind of transmission: the elegant, restless and lucid silence resonating throughout Aadland’s exquisite collection. — Martin Clark