Centrally placed in the room stands Halvdan Hafsten's desk. The worn surface of the desk bears traces of the collector. Once, he sat at this desk and worked on the archive of his collection. The desk was donated to the museum along with the collection and archive. The gift came with a wish that the museum would exhibit his desk alongside the artworks.

If Hafsten were to sit down at the desk today, he would look towards Siqueland's large spring-green painting, serving as the backdrop for some of the artworks from his collection. The painting Else med sjalet (Else with the Shawl) is one of the few portraits in Hafsten's collection. Alexander Schultz was not so concerned with depicting the woman Else with great portrait likeness; it was the interplay of forms and colors that fascinated him. However, the woman in the painting has a clear presence in the exhibition. Placed near Hafsten's desk, she can be experienced as a representative of her own time and that of Halvdan Hafsten.

In the midst of Schultz's paintings hangs a canvas depicting two bright, headless figures. The sleepwalker-like figures underscore the fluid sense of time that the exhibition invites. A clock hangs high on the wall. Once, most bourgeois homes had a ticking baseline. In the exhibition, you can hear clocks from different time periods playing out the sound of time. Time operates on many levels in this exhibition; the most obvious is the time that has passed from the paintings of the eight artists in the Hafsten collection to today. But the sound of time is also an invitation to look beyond the time that has passed and experience the artworks in the exhibition as dialogue partners in a contemporary recontextualization.

Alexander Schultz (1901-1981) was born in Oslo but grew up in Russia. He studied in Paris from 1919 to 1928 under Othon Friesz and Henrik Sørensen, and in Oslo from 1935 to 1937 under Georg Jacobsen and Jean Heiberg. Alexander Schultz is considered one of the finest colorists in Norwegian painting. He often worked with bright colors and thin paint reminiscent of watercolors. In 1955, he was appointed as a professor at the art academy, and his keen sense of color rooted in French painting was of great importance to the students. His subjects are often portraits or landscapes from his own surroundings. At the same time, he always maintained an interest in composition and form that transcends the naturalistic subject.