Since 2025, Clase has been developing exhibition communications for PoMo, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trondheim. Each project brings together editorial design, exhibition signage and communication materials, tailored to the curatorial vision of each exhibition.
Editorial Collection
We design PoMo’s exhibition catalogues as an editorial collection. All publications share a common graphic foundation linked to the identity developed for the museum, while allowing enough creative freedom for each catalogue to find its own visual language in response to the artist, the works and the exhibition’s content. In this way, the collection maintains a recognisable identity without becoming a rigid system: each catalogue belongs to the same series while offering a distinct interpretation of its exhibition.
From the outset, PoMo has conceived its catalogues as publications that go beyond documenting an exhibition or reproducing the works on display. Interviews, artists’ texts, essays, conversations with curators and contributions from other voices connected to the works and artists expand the content of each publication and build a narrative of its own. The catalogues thus become lasting objects, open to new interpretations beyond the duration of the exhibition.
Catherine Opie – Mountains Don’t Know Their Names
The catalogue brings together a new body of work by Catherine Opie, created during a three-week road trip through the Norwegian winter landscape in 2024. The project explores the relationship between landscape and gaze, identity, time, memory and climate change, connecting the photographs with the tradition of landscape photography and offering a more personal perspective on exploration, silence and the physical relationship with the environment.
The design translates these ideas into a physical experience of the landscape. Space, paper, colour and the rhythm of the images create a journey through different moments, scales and ways of looking, bringing the act of reading the catalogue closer to the experience of moving through the landscape.
Louise Bourgeois – Echo of the Morning
The catalogue presents Louise Bourgeois’s late work through themes such as memory, motherhood, the body, emotional bonds and the passage of time. The texts connect her personal and family experiences with more universal questions of identity, dependency, birth and mortality.
The design reflects this intimate dimension through a restrained, unhurried visual language. Cream-coloured paper, white space, double-page spreads and quotations introduce pauses and silences, creating a reading experience that echoes the intimacy and memory at the heart of Bourgeois’s work.
Picasso – The Code of Painting
The catalogue presents Pablo Picasso’s late period, particularly works created between 1961 and 1972, as a time of intense experimentation based on the repetition, variation and transformation of his own themes and visual devices. The texts connect this body of work with questions of identity, representation and the continued relevance of his visual language.
The design translates this idea of transformation into the publication itself. The relationships and sequences between images invite comparisons and reveal variations across the works, turning the catalogue into an extension of the exhibition and an interpretation of Picasso’s language as a code in constant transformation.
The Code of Painting focused on Picasso’s late period, a time of radical experimentation in which he revisited familiar themes with renewed energy and freedom. The exhibition brought together more than 50 paintings alongside a series of hand-painted ceramic plates, revealing how the artist continued to reinvent his own language until the end.
Photography by Valerie Sadoun
Postcards from the Future
The catalogue for Postcards from the Future, PoMo’s inaugural exhibition, brings together works by 24 artists around the idea of the postcard as a way of connecting different times, geographies and perspectives. The texts and four “literary postcards” introduce different voices and forms of fiction that broaden the interpretation of the works and the exhibition’s themes.
The design translates the idea of the postcard into the publication itself through its layout and the graphic devices that shape the book. These elements create a fragmented yet interconnected journey, making the catalogue an extension of the exhibition and a collection of images, voices and stories that reflects the diversity of PoMo’s collection.
A look into the exhibition and the signage we designed for Postcards from the Future, including wall texts, titles, and captions reflecting PoMo’s visual language.
Photography by Valerie Sadoun