Single pictures

Pictorial associations

It is probably a landscape. Both the shapes and colors give the distinct impression of grass, sky, nature. But exactly what we are looking at is uncertain: The brown shape which is the focal point of the scene may be a stump, or a mountain. Bjorn Kolbjørnsen’s abstract painting leaves a lot to the...

Laurie Grundt: Sokrates og Xantippe, 1997.

The Flower and the Bee

The flower and the bee. Who has not heard this metaphor of fertilization? The painting Socrates and Xantippe is clearly a play on the model of the flower and the bee. But Laurie Grundt has also given Xantippe large, sharp thorns.

Abstract Night

The coast is the subject of John Petter Havnerås’s Nocturne. The dark blue, which fills much of the picture, bears clear associations to the Norwegian sea, as it can be seen at night while there is still some light.

Green

A figure fills the picture plane. An oval face with no mouth or nose, but with pensive eyes and pronounced eyebrows. The arms are held up towards the face, against the mouth that is not there. The torso is angular, and ends in a ninety-degree angle at the thigh - the person is sitting with its legs...

Colorful machinery

An advanced machinery. That is the first association made by many viewers, when they see Ingvar Holmefjord’s painting from 1968. Geometric fields, with smaller circles, stripes and lines in other colors, create the impression of a homemade device.

A mood - but which?

A large, empty house and a woman. Clear, green grass against a bright blue sky. The house reflects both the green and the blue. Black, narrow trees are reflected in the windows, meandering ominously. Some areas are sharply, almost photographically painted (Kenneth Blom tends to use a photography as...

Jannecke Lønne Christiansen: Natt og dag (Night and day), 2007.

Riding in Dreams

A horse and rider is moving through a forest of blue mist. The equipage is framed by a small rectangle, brighter than the surrounding area. This places it outside of the rest of the picture, and strengthens the impression that we are looking into a dream. The whole picture is dominated by blue, but...

Outskirts

Realistic Surrealism: In this strange, colorful painting by Elizabeth Thun we see no people, but clear signs of their presence. What is reality, and what is a fantasy?

Black Cat

The painting is full of life, full of people. Large and small, they are standing in circles or sitting. A child is in the middle of a leap. The longer we look at the picture, the more people we see. Two animals are prominent in the painting.

Horses in Motion

When the horses are released into the pasture, they are full of pranks. They rush forward at a gallop, rearing and snorting. Johannes Vinjum’s painting captures the sheer joy of life in the animals.

Ornamented Political Criticism

This picture looks decorative, but it has a serious political content. Abu Ghurayb (Abu Ghraib) from 2007 is part of a series called Contemporary Decorative Political Patterns.

Geir Yttervik, 2007. Olje på lerret, 140 x 155 cm

Commentary on the bourgeois home

Geir Yttervik's painting is both a hommage to and a comment on the pictures created by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Hammerhøi's interiors are greatly contrasted by the chaotic space seen in Yttervik's picture.

An arena for pictorial action

In Gerhard Stoltz’s painting Arena, the movement is the focus. Two dynamic, sweeping yellow forms constitute a rough oval, which represents the main subject of the image - an arena.

The effect of abstraction

The motif is often the first thing we relate to when we look at a picture. When the motif is absent, other impressions come to the fore. In Inger Sitter’s large painting in the meeting room at the Centre for Continuing Education (EVU), the color comes first.

© Audun Hetland: Den leiken ville han sjå

He wanted to see that game

A man leans out of a boat, with one arm plunged deep into the water. Two seductive mermaids lure him to them. Soon he’ll be in the sea...

Roundness, Hardness

Sharply defined shapes in contrasting colors. Pink, yellow, black. In the prints of Gunnar S. Gundersen the shapes seem to vie for attention, and for the space in the foreground. There are no smooth transitions, but we can see that there is movement in the picture, that forms flow past each other.

© Per Christian Vatn / BONO. Rytter, 1988

Mysterious Mythology

Three heads are staring at us from painted surface. The center one belongs to a man, a rider, who is sitting on an animal’s back. The back arches up on each side to the other two heads. One head is a horse creature, the other looks more like a bird. They share the same, one back, and they each have...

The Apple Thief

Red, blue, yellow and black. An explosion of color almost succeeds in drowning out the subject in Per Christian Vatn’s lithograph, with the everyday title of Epletyven (The apple thief). A tree and a figure that reaches upward in the process of picking the fruit is indeed part of the scene, but far...

Familiar Sights, in Unfamiliar Combinations

A book with a blue cover is lying open over a female butt in maxi briefs. We see the woman’s body from the knees up to the waist, a section; she could be anyone. The woman lies on her stomach on a white surface, which is out of focus. The background, a turquoise wall, is even more diffuse.

Colour Fields

Four fields play together and against each other in this painting by Siren Blytt.

Winter Light

At first glance, the surface of the painting is blue-white, abstract. Just a few simple lines of white, laid thick enough that the shape becomes almost sculptural, suggest a motif. The painting is called Vinterlys over markene (Winter light over the fields), and when we ponder the title, a scene...

What do we see in a painting without figures?

The usual motif is absent, as is the title. The picture consists of shapes, placed seemingly randomly in the surface. They somehow present an end in themselves, making up an abstract realm that allows for rest and contemplation. It gives us the opportunity to regard the painting itself in a new way,...

Explosion of colors

Intense movement. That is the first, striking impression in the encounter with Knut Rumohr’s painting.

State authority: the modern version

Fritt etter Oscar Wergeland / U.P.I. (Losely after Oscar Wergeland / U.P.I.) refers to the famous painting of the Constitutional Assembly at Eidsvold in 1814. It was painted by Oscar Arnold Wergeland, 70 years after the Constitution was instituted, and hangs in the Hall of the Stortinget (Norwegian...