Repcol lets you see how representative a collection of art is. Which artists were acquired when? What was their gender? How many works were collected from each artist? Did it happen after their death?

Go try Repcol yourself

Repcol is an experimental prototype for viewing museum archives. It uses a simple visual grammar to translate an archive to a three dimensional shape. Artists are represented by prisms that begin at their year of birth and end at their passing. The size of each artist varies horizontally and vertically by the number of works collected. Red and blue prisms code for female and male artists respectively.

Along the side of each prism the works created by the artist are shown as thin white lines. The lines start when the work was produced and end when the work was acquired by the collection.

The service currently lets you explore the collection of The Norwegian National Museum. They have kindly provided us with a snapshot of the entire archive – it does therefore not adhere to their normal quality standards and may therefore contain errors.

Repcol has been made possible with the generous support of The Arts Council Norway and The Norwegian National Museum.