On Thursday, May 10th we will open our first exhibition with the painter Arne Malmedal.
Arne Malmedal (b. 1937) has long been an important figure in the Norwegian art scene. As founder and leader of the Faculty of Graphic Art in the Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo in the 1970s and as Administrative Director of Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, in the 1980s, Malmedal contributed to the realization of a series of important exhibitions.
He received his artistic education from the National College of Art and Design 1956-60, and held his first solo exhibition in 1963.

Malmedal was in 2003 honored with a large retrospective exhibition in the (then- named) Museum of Contemporary Art – an exhibition which travelled to Bergen Art Museum in 2004. The monograph ”Arne Malmedal” was published on that occasion.
In recent years, he has concentrated on painting, and today the focus is on the exploration of and experimenting with flatness/depth, picture/frame, color/brushstroke –in series of monochrome paintings.

The works in this exhibition are all in larger formats from the period 2005-07.
Central in the paintings is the color’s character, and they include–with the exception of white – only the colors cobalt and ultramarine.
The paintings have a monumental calm.
The extremely reworked monochromatic surfaces vibrate in their shimmering layers, creating a space into which the beholder is drawn.