VI, VII (pronounced “Sixes and Sevens”) is Oslo’s newest gallery, promoting Norwegian artists internationally and international artists in Norway for the first time. Founded by writer, curator and editor Esperanza Rosales, who recently moved from Brussels, where she was Director of dépendance gallery, VI VII will initially represent eight artists, including London-based sculptor Eloise Hawser, Norwegian filmmaker Lars Laumann, Berlin-based artist David Lieske and American collaborators, or conspirators, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff. The majority of these artists seem to reflect Rosales’ playful and experimental approach, with works structured loosely around autobiographical events or cast from the curious ephemera collected from personal experience. The first exhibition, “I’m Already a Has-Been,” saw American artist, writer, musician and publisher James Hoff present two groups of paintings based around language and abstraction “as a culture-bound illness.” One set of bold minimal paintings formulated abstraction as a cultural malady, which circulates like language; the second set was based on drawings found at stationary stores, where customers tested pens on communal notepads, expressing collective pathos and making formal allusion to Freudian analysis and Dadaist practice of automatic writing. Fitting for the gambling reference in its name, we anticipate good things here—chance encounters and fortuitous surprises. (Isobel Harbison)