Ever since the reopening of the hotel in 2019, and the establishment of the hotel's art programme, Britannia has been determined to exhibit the work of Sverre Bjertnæs. It is therefore with great honour and pleasure that we can present him as Britannia Artist 2022.

Sverre Koren Bjertnæs (born 1976) is considered one of Norway’s foremost contemporary artists. Despite his relatively young age, he has been working for almost 30 years, with an extensive back catalogue, including a wide variety of expressions and techniques.

His artistic education began in his teens, when he was a student of the sculptor Tore Bjørn Skjølsvik in his hometown, Trondheim. In 1993-94 Bjertnæs became a student of the painter Odd Nerdrum, acquiring basic painting techniques.

In 1995, the aspiring artist enrolled at the Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo, where he studied for the first year under Professor Arvid Pettersen. The following year, the Academy of Fine Arts established a separate class for figurative painting and traditional techniques, led by Professor Jan Sæther. Bjertnæs joined this class, before graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1999. He emerged as a mature artist with well-developed technical skills.

During his formative years, the artist concentrated on a series of teenage portraits, completed in a photorealistic style (sometimes referred to as super-realistic). Several of these paintings were shown in Bjertnæs' first solo exhibition in 2000, held at Galleri NAF (Norwegian Anarchist Fraction), an exhibition space in Oslo run by the artist Bjarne Melgaard. With this exhibition, Bjertnæs was highlighted by several critics as an important artist of his generation.

In pursuit of further artistic development, Bjertnæs went on to study at the Dutch Art Institute / ArtEZ hogeschool voor de kunsten, Enschede in the Netherland, from 2002 until 2004. Thereafter Bjertnæs began to work in a variety of techniques: sculpture, drawings, installations and video. This period culminated with the exhibition Nervous Fluids in the Stenersen Museum (Oslo 2013). The various objects were staged in spatial installations – an example of Gesamtkunstwerk - where the artist treated his works almost as an organic mass.

This aesthetic approach is witnessed in several of the artist’s later exhibitions and projects, including in Ikke alt som har vært, skal være med videre (‘Not everything that has been will be included’), at the Haugar Art Museum in Tønsberg (2019), the largest exhibition of Bjertnæs' works to date. In parallel with the exhibition, the first monograph on the artist was published (by Arnoldsche).

In recent years, Bjertnæs has again increasingly concentrated on painting, although he also dabbles in other media. In his recent paintings the artist appears to be inspired by, or referring to, the Norwegian modernist tradition from the post-war period. Artists from our recent past, such as Arne Ekeland, Jakob Weidemann and, not least, mentor Håkon Bleken, have become important points of reference.

In Bjertnæs' latest solo exhibition, 'Avstand' in Kunsthall Trondheim in 2021, we could see how the artist himself places himself in this tradition in his treatment of almost metaphysical themes.

Sverre Bjertnæs’ work is represented in several museums and private collections and the artist has held a number of exhibitions in Norway and internationally, including in Stenersenmuseet, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Haugar Kunstmuseum, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Kunsthall Trondheim and Galleri Brandstrup, and also regularly participates in large demonstrations such as The Armory Show in New York.

Article by Knut Ljøgodt Dr.philos., art historian, director of the Nordic Institute of Art and former director of the North Norwegian Art Museum. Co-author of Sverre Bjertnæs: Works (Arnoldsche 2019) together with Joakim Borda-Pedreira. Translated from the Norwegian by William Lee-Wright.