Do you own a work by Bjarne Melgaard, which you would like to sell?
Bjarne Melgaard Prices
Artist | Artwork | Price (incl. premium) |
---|---|---|
Bjarne Melgaard | Self Image as Alan Bates | €21.960 |
Bjarne Melgaard | Untitled | €11.408 |
Bjarne Melgaard was born in Sydney on 9 September 1967. He spent his childhood in his native Norway and then moved to Warsaw for a year to study art in the Polish capital followed also by one year each at the Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and the Rijksakademe van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. From early on, Melgaard’s art revolved around the essential themes of humanity, sexuality, pain, and death in everything, even the darkest, facets. He thematises self-harm, sadomasochism and fantasies of killing. Stylistically, Melgaard oscillates between extraordinary artistry and childish doodling, and his pictures are sometimes reminiscent of hallucinatory fantasies thrown down while intoxicated on drugs. He is never interested in catering to expectations; the artist is solely interested in what he wishes to express, and this is usually linked to his fascination with the violence that pervades human life every day.
Bjarne Melgaard repeatedly came into conflict with the authorities due to his choice of themes and, above all, his deliberately provocative approach to them. In Germany, the books for two of his exhibitions were placed on the list of media harmful to minors because they featured overly drastic depictions of castration, torture and execution. Breaking taboos is a fundamental approach in Melgaard’s art, who can hardly understand the excitement surrounding his works and refers to the age-old seductive power of violence, to the fascination of horror, which is part of the primal heritage of mankind. For his performances, the artist has staged himself as the victim of a fictitious ritual murder or presents his indexed paintings as the Ruins of an Exhibition after painting over them in black. His plan to send a live goat in a black latex costume onto the stage as a symbol of death provoked fierce protests from animal rights activists. Melgaard's art has also attracted attention from other artists: the French writer Karine Tuil featured Melgaard's sculpture The Black Woman Chair in her novel The Time of the Restless.
Bjarne Melgaard has also ventured outside of the visual arts into the genre of literature and written a 500-page novel. It was above all the immediacy of writing that fascinated him: For this type of art, he only needed a pen and paper, no canvas, no paint, no studio. Every single page was therefore written by hand by the artist - an authentic experience that was important to Melgaard. He also seeks to achieve this immediacy, the inspiration of the moment, for his paintings: Painting without correction, without overthinking, without reworking. Melgaard also occasionally works with musicians, mostly artists from the field of black metal, with one exception being the musician and lyricist Roger Baptist, with whom Melgaard created the artistic figure of Rummelsnuff. Fascinated by the muscular body of the former bouncer and bodybuilder, Melgaard dedicated a series of paintings and photographs to Rummelsnuff, which were also shown at Documenta 12 in Kassel.
Bjarne Melgaard lives and works in New York.
© Kunsthaus Lempertz
Do you own a work by Bjarne Melgaard, which you would like to sell?
Artist | Artwork | Price (incl. premium) |
---|---|---|
Bjarne Melgaard | Self Image as Alan Bates | €21.960 |
Bjarne Melgaard | Untitled | €11.408 |
About Cookies
This website uses cookies. Those have two functions: On the one hand they are providing basic functionality for this website. On the other hand they allow us to improve our content for you by saving and analyzing anonymized user data. You can redraw your consent to using these cookies at any time. Find more information regarding cookies on our Data Protection Declaration and regarding us on the Imprint.
Settings