Bjorn Ransve - Paintings

Bjørn Ransve (b. in 1944) is one of the most important contemporary Norwegian artists. Since the onset of late Modernism, he has played a crucial role in shaping painting in Scandinavia and today his works are represented in all important museums there. In the rest of Europe and the US, he is regarded as an insider tip for collectors. A particularly striking aspect of Ransve’s work is the constant shift between the representational and abstraction – often in parallel. In addition, he is a consummate master of traditional oil-painting techniques – working the medium in anything from small formats to canvases 15 metres across. His 1960s fragmented bodies, his searching studies of animal cadavers, the motifs he has borrowed from the history of art and his enigmatically demonic visions often look aggressive and distorted yet are sensitively executed – an ambivalence that informs Ransve’s oeuvre and is perhaps most radically expressed in works in which the representational clashes with abstraction. This book provides a survey of Ransve’s impressive painterly oeuvre. The accompanying text investigates the changing and recurrent groups of motifs and places the works in their art historical context. Since each page of the book has been designed individually in close collaboration between Ransve and the graphic artist and book designer Silke Nalbach, Bjørn Ransve’s development as an artist can be traced in a way that is particularly illuminating. Text in English with German translations.