Ervin Løffler
Galleri Brandstrup is pleased to announce Skulpturer, an exhibition of works by Ervin Løffler, opening on 15 October 2026. Coinciding with the exhibition is the launch of Lyset i marmor. Skyggen i bronse, a new book by Mathilde Fasting, published by PRESS, on Løffler’s life and artistic practice.
At the opening, artist Espen Dietrichson will speak about Ervin Løffler and his work. Mathilde Fasting will present the new publication and discuss her research and writing on the artist.
Bringing together sculptures in marble and bronze, Skulpturer foregrounds the formal language that came to define Løffler’s work: rounded volumes, compressed forms and openings that draw the surrounding space into the sculpture itself. The body remains a persistent presence, sometimes legible and at other times reduced to a suggestion of weight, movement or gesture. Human and animal forms, riders and musical instruments recur across his practice, gradually distilled into an increasingly abstract vocabulary.
Løffler was born in Hungary in 1922 and came to Norway as a refugee after the Second World War. He exhibited at Høstutstillingen for the first time in 1947 and began his career within the figurative tradition that dominated Norwegian sculpture in the 1940s and 1950s. When he returned to sculpture after a ten-year hiatus, his work had changed considerably. By the end of the 1960s, abstraction had become central to his practice, placing him within a generation that also included Arnold Haukeland and Aase Texmon Rygh, while his approach remained distinctly his own.
Where Haukeland often pursued movement and dynamism, and Texmon Rygh worked through geometry, Løffler developed a sculptural language grounded in organic form. Mass and void are closely interdependent in his work. Openings cut through otherwise solid bodies, altering the sculpture from every angle and allowing light, shadow and the space around the work to become part of its composition.
This sensitivity to form was closely tied to Løffler’s command of material. He worked extensively in bronze and stone, with marble becoming particularly important to his practice. From the 1970s, periods spent working in Pietrasanta in Tuscany allowed him to realise works on a larger scale and deepen his engagement with the material. The precision of his carving is balanced by an unusual softness: surfaces swell, narrow and fold into one another, giving even the most substantial works an underlying sense of movement.
Løffler’s major exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in 1977 marked a significant point in his career, and his sculptures are represented in a number of public spaces in Norway. Following his death in June 2012, Løffler was posthumously awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica distinction on 20 July 2012, recognising his contribution to the promotion of Hungarian culture abroad and to cultural relations between Hungary and other nations.
Skulpturer brings Løffler’s works into close proximity, offering a focused view of an artist whose exploration of the body, material and negative space developed into one of the more singular sculptural languages of his generation.
Ervin Løffler — Skulpturer
Opening 15 October 2026
Galleri Brandstrup
Briskebyveien 72, Oslo