BERGEN.- The wide-ranging exhibition Nordmandsdalen explores the intersection of power, materials and art during the era of absolute monarchy in Denmark-Norway.

Between 1764 and 1784, a grandiose sculpture park was created at Fredensborg Palace, north of Copenhagen. It featured 70 life-sized statues of Norwegian, Sámi and Faroese men and women. The sculpture park was called Nordmandsdalen – ‘The Valley of the Norsemen’.

These works were created by the court sculptor Johann Gottfried Grund (1733–1796), who received his commission from the king of Denmark-Norway. The Nordmandsdalen park is often referred to as the first “democratic” project in Dano-Norwegian art history as it represented something new in the 1700s. Rather than depicting classical mythological figures or royalty—as was typical at the time—the sculptural program portrayed “ordinary people”: fishermen, farmers, loggers and hunters.

A lesser-known aspect of Nordmandsdalen is that the project had its origins in the Norwegian city of Bergen, where the postman Jørgen Christensen Garnaas (1723–1798) made a series of figurines that served as the starting point for the statues. Garnaas delivered letters to and from the city of Bergen via postal routes across Norway. On his journeys, he became well acquainted with the geography and people of the country and depicted those he met by making small figurines in wood and ivory—often in pairs.

In 1764, Jørgen Garnaas traveled to the royal capital of Copenhagen. There, in an audience with Frederick V, he stood face-to-face with the most powerful man in the kingdom. Garnaas’s figurines must have appealed to the monarch, as they were later added to the Royal Danish Collection. The king commissioned Garnaas to make a series of Norwegian and Sámi figurines in ivory. The ivory was sourced from elephant and walrus tusks imported from the Dano-Norwegian colonies in Africa and on Greenland. As royal collector’s objects made with colonial materials, the figurines demonstrated the monarch’s wealth and power. In Denmark, Garnaas’s figurines were later used as the basis for copperplate prints, the monumental sandstone statues in the Nordmandsdalen sculpture park, and delicate porcelain figurines.

A democratic project—or propaganda

The exhibition Nordmandsdalen at Kode Bergen Art Museum offers a critical perspective on this grandiose project. Nordmandsdalen depicts “the people”, but perhaps more importantly it also reveals how the Dano-Norwegian monarchy viewed its subjects. The park testifies to an 18th-century idealisation of rural life, while the placement of the sculptures also symbolizes the monarch’s absolute power over his subjects. Describing the project as democratic obscures the fact that the sculpture park was closely linked to the visual propaganda apparatus of the absolute monarchy.

Most of the figures carry attributes indicating the nature of their work—fish, lobsters, poultry, or logs. Thus Nordmandsdalen gives us an insight into the importance of these people to the economic geography of the realm, reflecting the mercantilist doctrine of the Dano-Norwegian state in the 18th century.

The exhibition aims to shed new light on the important connections and exchanges between Norwegian, Danish and Sámi fine and decorative art during the age of absolutism.

Major research collaboration

The exhibition Nordmandsdalen was created by Kode in collaboration with the research projects Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era (University of Copenhagen, 2022–25) and NorWhite: How Norway Made the World Whiter (University of Bergen).

The project is in part based on collections held by Kode and the University Museum of Bergen, highlighting their common origin in Bergen Museum, which celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2025.