Bjarne Melgaard


Bjarne Melgaard is a Norwegian artist based in New York City. He has been described as "one of Norway's most important artists" and, following the 2014 publicity about his sculpture, Chair, "the most famous Norwegian artist since Edvard Munch."

Life and work

Melgaard was born in Sydney to Norwegian parents, raised in Oslo, Norway, and works and lives in New York. Early in his career Melgaard created controversial installations referencing subversive subcultures such as S&M and heavy metal music. Currently, his practice consists of an emphasis on expressionistic paintings and drawings, often containing text.
Melgaard studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts, Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 1991 to 1992 and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht from 1992 to 1993.
His first show in New York was in 2000, where he exhibited sculptures of apes engaged in sex acts. Melgaard moved permanently to New York in 2009.
In January 2014 his fibreglass artwork, Chair, sparked controversy when a picture was published of it on a fashion website. The chair appeared to be a black woman on her back with the seat cushion supported on her thighs. Magazine owner Dasha Zhukova was pictured sitting on the cushion. After angry accusations of racism the picture was withdrawn. Melgaard has created it as a reinterpretation of a similar chair by British pop artist Allen Jones, and intended it to be a comment on gender and racial politics. Gallery director Steven Pollock said "Acceptance is not the goal and he doesn’t subscribe to the European politically correct attitude of placating cultural expectations. He’s certainly not racist, and used to have a black boyfriend."

Notable exhibitions

2019
2013
2012
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
Melgaard appears in Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary about the Norwegian black metal scene in the 1990s. The film featured in the 15th Athens International Film Festival, screened at Danaos Cinema. In the film, an exhibition of Melgaard's in a Stockholm gallery is extensively shown, along with his comments on black/death metal.