oslo Negativ – Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo 

Arno Rafael Minkkinen
10 – 25 October 2026

WILLAS contemporary returns to ON
This October, WILLAS contemporary returns to Oslo for ON — Oslo Negativ, Norway's largest festival dedicated to photography. It is our fourth participation: we presented Nick Brandt and Roger Ballen in 2021, Helene Schmitz in 2022, and Anton Corbijn in 2025. This year, we present the work of Arno Rafael Minkkinen.

Even those unfamiliar with the name will recognize the images — a body folded into a rock face, a figure dissolving into a horizon line, always alone, always in black and white. Since 1969, Minkkinen has photographed himself within landscapes, not as portraiture in the conventional sense, but as an ongoing inquiry into whether a body and a place can hold the same form.

Now eighty, Minkkinen continues the practice largely as he began it: unmanipulated, in black and white, working alone across five decades and every continent. It stands as one of the longest unbroken bodies of self-portrait work in the history of the medium, and has shaped how a generation of photographers approach the relationship between body and landscape.

The exhibition at Nasjonalgalleriet spans work made between 1970 and 2025, captured across thirty countries and thirty-one American states. It is neither arranged chronologically nor conceived as a retrospective. Instead, it traces a single, sustained inquiry into vulnerability, solitude, and the point at which the self gives way to landscape.

Minkkinen's path to photography was not direct. He studied English Literature at Wagner College and worked as a copywriter on Madison Avenue before turning to photography under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned his MFA. A Guggenheim fellow, he has paired his artistic practice with a long academic career, and now holds positions as Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts and Docent at Aalto University in Helsinki. He received the Académie des Beaux-Arts Photography Award, William Klein 2025 and was named the recipient of Finlandia Foundation National's Artist of the Year 2026–2027.

Minkkinen’s works are held in over 80 prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide, such as the Musée d’art Moderne and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the High Art Museum in Atlanta, the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki. Major solos have recently been held in contemporary art museums in Lima, Zagreb, and St. Petersburg, Russia along with 50-year retrospectives at Fotografiska Stockholm and Tallinn, Munich’s Kunstfoyer, and La Patinoire Royale in Brussels.

This year's festival theme, Passion, suits an artist who has sustained a single preoccupation for five decades. ON itself continues to grow: this edition spans three floors of Nasjonalgalleriet, more than 2,000 square metres, including the former Munch room. More than 10,000 visitors attended last year.

WILLAS contemporary will be presenting in the hall beside the former Munch hall.

Save the dates: ON — Oslo Negativ 10 – 25 October 2026, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo