Bjarne Melgaard valuation
Norwegian painter of loud, thickly painted canvases crowded with text, hybrid creatures and Munch's themes.
Bjarne Melgaard was born in Sydney in 1967 to Norwegian parents and grew up in Oslo, where he studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Netherlands in 1991 for the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
What a work by Bjarne Melgaard is worth
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Bio
Bjarne Melgaard was born in Sydney in 1967 to Norwegian parents and grew up in Oslo, where he studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Netherlands in 1991 for the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. From the mid-1990s he developed a gestural, neo-expressionist painting, in thick, bright oil against flat grounds, populated by hybrid human and animal figures and scrawled with phrases in Norwegian and English. His subjects are the ones respectable culture keeps out of sight: sexuality, self-destruction, drugs, fringe religion and the subcultures of the margins, treated with a mix of celebration and dread, and his references run from Edvard Munch to the Pink Panther. He works across sculpture, installation, fashion, novels, furniture and virtual reality as well. He represented Norway at the Venice Biennale of 2011 and was in the Whitney Biennial of 2014, lived in New York for several years and returned to Oslo in 2017.
He is very productive, and his paintings, drawings and works on paper come up regularly; the large canvases of the 2010s are the most sought after, and the date and the exhibition a work was in place it. Collaborative works, some painted with the Norwegian artist Sverre Koren Bjertnæs, should be identified as such. Thickly built paint can crack and lift on rolled or poorly stored canvases. Thaddaeus Ropac represents him.
Sydney, Oslo and the Munch Museum
The Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo held a retrospective of his work in 2010, and the Munch Museum hung him beside Munch in Melgaard + Munch in 2015 and gave him a full retrospective in 2023.
In 2014 his sculpture Chair, a reworking of Allen Jones's furniture sculpture of a bound woman, drew wide criticism after a photograph of a collector seated on it circulated online.
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