Arnvid Aakre, Bergen
Member Since July 2017
Artist Statement Making art is for me to enter a pure visual reality. In this process I often stumble over new worlds, beings and situations I didn't know existed before I started creating them.
In the beginning, all was colourless, so my first two one-man shows were paintings in black and white. The reason for this was that colours then were just decorations for me. After this colour-celibacy, I got a new way of working with colours, and my artworks are today a combination of direct lines and the language of colours.
My background includes many one-man shows, group exhibitions and even a large 'gesamtkunstwerk' were artists was working together across different artistic media. That project got patronage from UNESCO HQ in Paris in 1989.
If I'm part of an artistic movement, this is neo-impressionism. This form of art expression is still fundamental in my works, but I see that surrealism has started to manifest itself in my artworks lately. Not only surrealism with the focus on standard dreams, but even subtle nightmares, or daydreams. In many of my latest works, you can see the strange combination of neo-impressionism and neo-surrealism.
In a period I was (in addition to being an artist), responsible for an artist run gallery where I among others had the honor to arrange an exhibition for Christo.
Then (1990), I left the standard art industry with all its curators and blind money focus.
I was free again, left Europe and stayed permanently in Egypt for nearly fifteen years. Here I learned from the masters of ancient tomb paintings and got good friends among Egyptian contemporary artists. I'm sure they all influenced my artworks to a certain degree - but most of all it was important to get a distance to a western art scene.
The western art industry has unfortunately changed visual art from the freedom of the golden years in Paris during the beginning of last century - to a prison for art where even street art sometimes are eaten by galleries and their shallow investors. Still, I can't blame the art industry for this, as it's the duty of the artists, to demand artistic freedom again, and again.
Now my family and I live in the west coast city of Bergen in Norway. I still refuse standard galleries, curators and other who limits modern art.
My paintings have gone from large canvases, acrylic, pigments and brushes - to digital tools. But I don't create 'digital art', I paint or draw with digital tools. Yes, of course, it's a different way to paint digital compared to acrylic and canvas. Still, the difference between acrylic and oil is for me larger than it was between acrylic and digital painting.
It’s important to stress that for me, 'digital' is a tool, not an art form. Welcome to my visual universe!
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