The Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum does big, dark, brooding narrative scenes that look like they were painted in the seventeenth century. He has been exhibiting in New York since the early Eighties. His last large New York show was held jointly at the Martina Hamilton Gallery and the Germans van Eck Gallery in 1986. For all its faults and lapses, that exhibition proved to me that Nerdrum is an enormous talent. If the show as a whole was very uneven, some of the individual pictures were brilliant.
This year’s show, held in November at the Edward Thorp Gallery, represented a huge step forward. It was a far more powerful, consistent, and original statement. Nerdrum’s darks have become richer, more evocative; the skin tones lighter, more lustrous. His realism is now broader but also more refined, more finished.
He studied at the Dusseldorf Academy under the famous neo-Dadaist and political activist Josef Beuys.
Nerdrum lives in Oslo and is forty-three years old. He studied at the Dusseldorf Academy under the famous neo-Dadaist and political activist Josef Beuys. But Nerdrum’s art today couldn’t be more different from Beuys’s, for Nerdrum paints like the Old Masters. He works directly from models whom he poses wearing special costumes. Grinding his own pigments, he applies many glazes to get rich, deep, dark depths. He only completes seven or eight pictures a year. Because of their theatrical lighting, these pictures remind you most of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Figures emerge from mysterious shadows
