The museum that delivers

Owned and operated by the Norwegian holding company Reitan, PoMo is the personal project of Trondheim residents Monica Reitan and Ole Robert Reitan, whose investment in the city’s cultural renaissance extends to the brand-new theatre nearby, and the Reitan family’s 5-star Britannia Hotel, conveniently located opposite the museum. Today, Trondheim is mainly known as a trading hub, for its university, and for its magnificent Nidaros Cathedral, but the hotel’s name is a reminder of the days when it hosted British aristocrats, who came to Trondheim for the salmon fishing.

Despite their evident confidence, the team behind the new museum, realised by French-Iranian architect and designer India Mahdavi in collaboration with Norwegian architect Erik Langdalen, recognised from the outset that success would depend on winning over the people of Trondheim.

“Absolutely everyone in the region has a relationship to the building,” explains communications manager Arnaud Fontaine. “It’s been closed for 12 years and so for the normal person in the street, it’s an important signal that we’ve chosen to restore this building as a very modern building again, and reopen it as a meeting place.”

What was once the post hall now accommodates a series of large contemporary sculptures, including Franz West’s giant worm cast Meeting Point, 2010, and Katharina Fritsch’s Madonna, 1987/2024, its neon glow illuminating the white walls and making playful conversation with the salmon pink gift shop. 

Evidence of the building’s previous incarnation remains, and director Marit Album Kvernmo is convinced that her fellow locals will recognise the circular wooden benches modelled on original fittings, and the columns decorated with folkloric figures, invented in a bout of patriotic feeling following Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905. 

Still more far-fetched, but surely PoMo’s crowning glory is the staircase, modelled, says India Mahdavi, on the old post office parcel chute, and coloured the glorious orange commonly found on the external woodwork of Trondheim’s traditional houses. 

In fact, the original art nouveau building, designed, like the Britannia Hotel and several other Trondheim buildings by architect Karl Norum, was cutting edge in 1911, and features a steel frame closer to the building methods of Chicago or New York, than Scandinavia. 

The architects have leaned into its modernity, while also honouring local materials like terrazzo flooring and wood, which has been worked by leading local artisans. Subtle references to local colours and materials are thrown aside in the reading room, nestled inside the third floor attic space and fully committed to colour and pattern in an all-out celebration of Nordic folkloric art.

Like the rest of the museum, the cosy reading room is accessible as part of the ticket price, a welcoming gesture underscored by a broad events programme for adults and children, and carried through in the choice and display of the art. 

The inaugural exhibition Postcards from the Future, which showcases PoMo’s permanent collection supplemented with loans, is all about creating Instagram opportunities, such as Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s Benzene Float (Hexaphenyl), 2025, an inflatable sculpture in the museum’s outdoor viewing area. 

Still, it’s early days, and while the Reitan family collection is understandably a dominant presence for now, PoMo is clear about its ambitions as a collecting institution and emphasises that “we are building, developing and growing a collection at the same time as we are building a new art institution.”

In the long term, this may be where PoMo really makes its mark – its intention is to address the gender imbalance found in museums worldwide, by dedicating a minimum of 60% of its acquisitions budget to women artists. Already, it says, the collection boasts almost 40% female artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Anne Imhof, and Simone Leigh.

There’s depth to the collection, too, and a series of architectural fantasies by the 18th-century Italian artist and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi make an interesting dialogue with Anne Imhof’s equally unsettling urban scrawls.

Predictably, perhaps, the jewel in the collection is a room of graphic works by Edvard Munch, all on loan from the Reitan Family Collection. Displayed on walls painted a deep blue, the works are all part of The Frieze of Life, the major project of Munch’s career in which he set out to represent the human experience in all its shades and extremes of emotion. 

The series includes the artist’s most famous and celebrated works, including Madonna, Vampire and The Scream, all of which can be seen here as prints. This is no hardship – Munch was an exceptional printmaker and he habitually reworked his core motifs, refining and simplifying them, often over many years. 

The Kiss IV, 1902, demonstrates Munch’s extraordinary skill in distilling form and emotion into a handful of lines; it also highlights the importance of materials in his work, whether in paint, lithograph, or woodcut. In this woodcut, the grain of the wood is as pronounced as Munch’s motif, giving it a poignancy entirely separate from the painted version of this subject.

Happily for Norway’s museums, its best-loved and most celebrated artist produced everything in multiples: so it is that PoMo has its own copy of The Scream, a lithograph which may well end up being its biggest draw. But this daringly reimagined building could come to be seen as another Norwegian masterpiece.

PoMo is at Dronningens gate 10, Trondheim, Norway. www.pomo.no