Odd Nerdrum
Odd Nerdrum (born April 8 1944) is a Norwegian-Icelandic figurative painter.
Nerdrum was born in Oslo and studied traditional classical painting in the Art Academy of Oslo and, with Joseph Beuys, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He began to teach himself how to paint in a classical manner, putting himself in direct opposition to the art of his native Norway. Nerdrum devised a method of painting of mixing and grinding his own pigments, stretching his canvas and the working from live models. He had his first one-person gallery exhibition in New York at the Martina Hamilton Gallery in 1983. He is now living in Iceland. Nerdrum became a controversial artist, claiming among other things that his art should be understood as kitsch rather than art as such.
Nerdrum divides his time between his home in Iceland and his farm in Norway.
Kitsch
A large proportion of Nerdrum's work involves classical figures set in an apocalyptic landscape (Paul A Cantor at ArtCyclopedia, compares Nerdrum's art to "the result if Rembrandt had painted the sets of The Road Warrior").[1]
Drawings and Prints
Odd Nerdrum prints are based on his paintings. An etching entitled Baby is based on a painting of the same title from 1982. Nerdrum refers to his charcoal drawings as "paintings" probably because they are highly finished charcoal drawings. Nerdrum’s prints and drawings display the same attention to finish and detail as his paintings. Often his drawings are quite large in scale and are works in their own right, as well as being studies for future paintings.
Collections
His work is in several important public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, The National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, The New Orleans Museum in LA, The Portland Art Museum in OR, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in CA, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.
Exhibitions
Kunstnerforbundet 1967-70-73 Oslo-76-84
Galleri 27 Oslo 1972
The Bedford Way Gallery 1982
Martina Hamilton Gallery 1984
Delaware Art Museum Wilmington 1985
The Museum of Contemporary Art ,Chicago IL 1988
Lemberg Gallery Birmingham 1991 MI
Gothenburg art Museum Sweden 1991
Bergen Art Museum Norway 1992
Edward Thorp Gallery New-York 1992
New Orleans Museum of Art 1994
Forum Gallery ,New-York 1996
Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo Norway 1998
Kunsthal Rotterdam ,The Netherlands 1999
Amos Andersson Museum, Finland 1999
Young Classic, Harry Bergman Gallery, Alands Art museum 2000 Finland
Forum Gallery, New-York and Los Angeles 2002
Forum Gallery, New-York and Los Angeles 2004
Forum Gallery, Los Angeles 2006
Forum Gallery, New-York January 2007
Forum Gallery, New-York May 2007
Reviews
"There are more men than women here, but sexual pairing seems to occur only in death (or a sleep resembling death). Which is not to say desire is nowhere present. It is everywhere. If anything makes these pictures compelling, it's their consistent fascination with the human body. The images--of paired corpses, madmen, men in pain, a man without eyes--may be frightful and abhorrent, but every limb and torso is lovingly rendered. Pale, muscular, sexual, the figures are painted so that one must take them seriously--in much the same way that it is music that grounds the otherwise bizarre stage spectacles of Wagnerian opera."
Bibliography
Odd Nerdrum:Paintings,Sketches and drawings by Richard Vine.
Odd Nerdrum: Paintings by Jan-Erik Ebbestad Hansen
Odd Nerdrum:Storyteller and Self Revealer by Jan-Åke Pettersson.
Odd Nerdrum: Drawings by Odd Nerdrum.
Odd Nerdrum: Themes by Odd Nerdrum and Bjorn Li.
Trivia
The 2000 horror film The Cell featured a scene that was heavily influenced by Nerdrum's 1990 painting Dawn. The scene features three identical figures sitting down, looking upwards with pained, trance-like expressions on their faces. On the film's audio commentary, director Tarsem Singh names it as the origin of the scene's imagery, having seen it while visiting David Bowie, who owns the painting.[2]
Nerdrum created the cover of the progressive rock band Junipher Greene's LP Friendship (1971).
References
External links
- Odd Nerdrum official website
- Forum Gallery - the gallery representing Nerdrum
- Art in Context - relevant links to Nerdrum, including list of exhibitions
- A web page showing paintings by Nerdrum - "selvportrett" = self portraits (lower part of page show paintings by other painters)
- "Odd Nerdrum near Icelandic citizenship" - article in Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, December 12, 2003
- Odd Nerdrum in artcyclopedia
- Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington - Spring,1977
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