Bjarne Melgaard

BJARNE MELGAARD (1967-) is one of Norway’s most important and controversial contemporary artists. Over the past twenty years, he has held a number of controversial exhibitions, including one side by side with Edvard Munch at the Munch museum. He also designed a house to die along with Snøhetta, designed rugs with Røros Tweed, collaborated with leading fashion house, wrote a novel about a brutal gay environment in New York and created an installation of a five-story exhibition in New York inspired by this book.
At the Vienna Biennale in 2011 he collaborated with unknown artists with a mental illness and focused on HIV / AIDS. His art has been purchased by the Astrup Fearnley Museum, the Norwegian National Gallery and MoMA

Melgaard is most famous for his expressive paintings, installations, photographs and video works where the artistic starting point has been the Norwegian black metal culture and the gay S/M-scene. Personal mythology and identity searching in a chaotic world has become his trademark. Melgaard says that he is not looking to provoke, just questioning the adopted truths. Like pictures must hang straight on the wall.

The contrasts are prominent in Melgaard’s art; a contrast between the warm delicate colors and the cold expression, a contrast between the gloomy and the beautiful. For example, we can point out how the artist uses an expressionistic soft pencil in depictions of sexual depression. Or how he compiles Olivia Newton’s love clichés with drawings of bleeding naked men’s bodies wearing bondage hoods. It is precisely this kind of combination that makes Bjarne Melgaard’s work cross-border. Melgaard’s art can be perceived as both provocative and challenging, but the artist is the opposite of his art. He believes that people do not understand his humor. The art is provocative, but he can not take responsibility for how others perceive it.

(source: https://www.fineart.no/kunstner/bjarne-melgaard)