Ornulf Opdahl: Mood Paintings of the North

View works at Kings Place Gallery by Ornulf Opdahl

Christmas Hours: Please note the gallery will close at 13.00 on Thursday 24th December and re-open at 10.00 on Monday 4th January 2010.

It is no mere coincidence that Norway’s most distinguished landscape painters come from the west of Norway, a landscape which is marked by deep contrasts and an evanescent light. Ornulf Opdahl lives and works on the island of Godoy on the west coast near Alesund where he was born. Like Wordsworth who believed that growing up in the Lake District made him a “favoured being”, Opdahl, after years of living in Oslo returned to his home landscape for similar reasons.

The landscape of the Sunmore Mountains and nearby fjords continues to move him profoundly. He knows the routes up to the glaciers, and the minor tracks around the fjords and the different kinds of rock on cliff faces. He knows too about the different kinds of snow and the way in which they reflect light. Indeed, when Robert Rosenblum, in discussing Edvard Munch, wrote of his sensitivity to the extremes of natures forces “first the extinction of light in the long, dark and cold winter, and then the dramatic resurrection of the sun which reigns during the summer months, deep into the night”, he could equally have been invoking Opdahl.

However, for all that his relationship with his native landscape is experiential, his pictorial approach to it is meditative and philosophical. Opdahl’s mood paintings of the North, with their colours like dying embers of a fire – glowing umber, the greys of ashes and charcoal blacks, often have a sense of imminence. However, his potentially menacing landscapes can also resemble paradise on earth, of winter nights emanating light, of skies irradiated by stars; a cosmic reminder of infinity and an intimation of mortality.

ASSOCIATED LECTURE:
7th December 18.30
A bigger picture: The Art of Ornulf Opdahl by Michael Tucker

Born in 1944, the Norwegian Ornulf Opdahl is one of the most important painters working in Scandinavia today. Strongly influenced by the sublime sense of place so evident in the magnificent coastal landscape of his native West Norway, his powerfully scaled, lyrically charged work draws upon and develops stimulating currents from both his own Norwegian landscape tradition and the philosophical or spiritual concerns of much post-1945 abstract art. This illustrated lecture sets Opdahl’s striking work within a variety of contexts, including those of recent Nordic art, music and poetry, in order to illuminate the larger dimensions of his art.

Michael Tucker D Litt is Professor of Poetics at the University of Brighton and a regular reviewer for Jazz Journal. A contributor to monographs on Alan Davie, Ian McKeever and Andrzej Jackowski, he is a specialist in Nordic culture and has curated and published widely in this field, including articles and books on Icelandic art, the Norwegian painter Frans Widerberg and his compatriot, the saxophonist and composer Jan Garbarek. He gave the lecture ‘From The Modern Life Of The Soul: Revisioning The Legacy Of Edvard Munch’ for the Royal Academy in London, during the recent exhibition there of the self-portraits of Munch.

St. Pancras Room, Level -2, Kings Place.
Tickets: £9.50 online: www.kingsplace.co.uk / Box Office: 020 7520 1490.

Touring to the University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery/  26 February - 9 April 2010

Watch a film about Ornulf Opdahl