Sverre Bjertnæs - Tilbake til Atuona

Name: Sverre Bjertnæs - Tilbake til Atuona
Start: 2025-02-26T18:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-02-26T20:00:00+01:00
Location: Engelsminnegata 17, 4009 Stavanger, Norway

Schedule

Wed Feb 26 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Engelsminnegata 17, 4009 Stavanger, Norway | Stavanger, RO

Sverre Koren Bjertnæs, born in Trondheim in 1979, is one of Norway’s most central contemporary artists. At the young age of 13 he started his apprenticeship with the sculptor Tore Bjørn Skjølsvik, and aged 16 he became a pupil of Odd Nerdrum. In 1995, he was accepted at Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo, and in 2004 he finished his master’s degree at The Dutch Art Institute (DAD). While other artists have built their careers stone by stone, Bjertnæs perceives his early success as challenging seeing as he became famous before he found his own identity. In Mine bilder, a collection of essays published in 2021, he describes a gradual process where he has learned to embrace not having to defend a given core, but to be flexible and open to influences. This has also lead him into artistic co-operation with for instance Bjarne Melgaard and Håkon Bleken.
This new exhibitiont at BGE, titled «Return to Atuona», also contains works with co-operation at the centre, but this time the sculptures are made in co-operation with the artist’s deceased mother, ceramist Randi Koren Bjertnæs, who died in 2023. The title refers to the last place of residence of the painter Paul Gauguin, the island of Atuona, where he is now burried. Gauguin became central in Bjerknæs’ early interest for art through his mother’s art books, and through their numerous shared experiences of the painter’s exhibitions.
Gauguin's penchant for the exotic, in addition to his problematic view of women, has in recent years been seen in a more critical light, but in the exhibition title Bjertnæs primarily refers to the humour in the intended isolation in which Gauguin put himself, the painter who lives in seclusion with his works. In recent years, Bjertnæs has given up the idea of large studio productions, and retired to work in a smaller room in the apartment in which he lives.
Bjertnæs currently works mainly with painting, sculpture and graphics. The motifs are characterized by variations around meetings between two people. Sometimes we see eye contact or touch, other times one or both are turned away from the other. The human figures are often without individual features, and are reminiscent of sculptures, as if they are universal representations of certain characteristics or roles. In that way, they have both something familiar and something distant about them, partly belonging to everyday life and partly something timeless. Various patterns in varied and powerful colors often surround the people, placing them in even more dreamlike or mythological surroundings. The mythological is perhaps even more prominent in the sculptures, which often include animal figures. Something surprising and hopeful, but at the same time disturbing, perhaps doubtful, creates tension in both the paintings and the sculptures. Bjertnæs is reticent to elaborate on the content of his own paintings, and rather emphasizes that it is all about the act of painting, from the time you start the process until the work is finished. He leaves it to others to draw references to art history, and to interpret the theme and message. Bjertnæs says that, as a young artist, very clear ideologies were imposed on him. In his further career, it has thus become an important and liberating project to get rid of ideological guidance. Now he prefers to start by building up abstract color surfaces with different materials, which in turn initiates the motifs and themes spontaneously and intuitively.
In 2008, Bjertnæs received the first grant from the newly established Håkon Bleken Foundation, and in 2019 he received a 10-year grant from the Norwegian Culture Council. The international breakthrough came in New York in 2011, when he participated in the exhibition “After Shelley Duvall '72 (Frogs on the High Line)”, curated by Bjarne Melgaard. The exhibition received very positive reviews and was highlighted as one of the ten best exhibitions of the year in the New York Times. Bjertnæs has carried out several public decoration commissions, and is represented in various museums, including the Astrup Fearnley museum, Trondheim art museum, Stavanger art museum and KODE in Bergen.