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6/4/2001

Odd Nerdrum

Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik

Kitch painter

Reykjavik Art Museum - Kjarvalsstadir April 7th - May 27th 2001 The Norwegian painter, Odd Nerdrum (born 1944), has a unique position in contemporary art. His challenging pathos and unashamedly unfashionable qualities have provoked some people, and won admiration from others. His considerable depth and unwavering consistency have made him one of the great storytellers of our age, with paintings, which are always related to his life. He has created his own landscape. The outsider - who keeps his distance or is rejected by society - has been a central theme in Odd Nerd rum’s work.

Odd Nerd rum’s challenging statements in the media have won him a place in the public eye. The paintings in this exhibition demonstrate his developments from the id- 1980s, particularly his most recent works in which he provocatively labels himself as a kitch painter.

Ever since his debut in 1964, Nerdrum has vigorously expressed his doubts about modernism. Instead, he has based himself on Rembrandt’s light and Caravaggio´s 17th century realism. His subject - which often had social and political themes in the 1970s - acquired a more mythical slant in the 1980s, with figures roaming through a desolate landscape. In the spring of 1986, Odd Nerdrum visited Iceland for the first time, discovering a physical expression of his inner landscape, in which the boundaries between the distant past, the present and the future are dissolved.

There was growing restlessness and anxiety in his paintings in the early 1990s. Relations between men and women became a hostile battleground, but there is a more conciliatory spirit in some lighter and more vibrant works produced in the summer of 1997.

His theme in recent years has been gender and the processes of the human body, seen in any works depicting hermaphrodite figures in which man and woman merge. In late 1997, Nerdrum declared that he had gradually come to the conclusion that he was a kitch painter. But he believes that art and kitch have changed places today. While art is permeated by irony and disassociation, kitch represents a profoundly serious approach. Kitch is private, appealing to the individual. Nerdrum has apologized to his critics, since he now considers that he was sailing under a false flag when he described himself as an artist.

image: NERDRUM. Self portrait in golden gown, 1997-98, 187 x 144cm, collection Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst

Reykjavík Art Museum - Kjarvalsstadir , Flókagata , 105 Reykjavík , Iceland , Tel. +354 552 6131 , Fax + 354 562 6191

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