Bjarne Melgaard is the creator of colorful paintings and installations of contemporary art truly distinctive from the rest. His practice is as immersive as it is provocative.

Bjarne Melgaard is a contemporary Norwegian artist working in sculptural assemblage. Engaging a plethora of methods in his paintings, sculptures, writing, and sensory installations, Melgaard probes psychological angst and taboo-bending subcultures. In recent work, he has crafted large-scale pink panther figures, some holding meth pipes, covered in seemingly arbitrary swaths of paint.

His expressionistic paintings incorporate texts that have a confessional quality, revealing desires, fears, violence, personal anxieties, drug-taking, and sex, though whether these relate to a fictional or real persona is left ambiguous.

Often employing controversial and provocative imagery, he is perhaps best known for his notorious fiberglass sculpture Chair(2014), which depicts a black woman on her back while a white woman sits on the cushion of her thighs. When the work first appeared online, it ignited an outcry and drew accusations of racism, and the image was ultimately withdrawn.

See also Colorful artistic paintings by Franz Ackermann HERE!

Bjarne was born in 1967, in Sydney, but he was raised in Oslo, Norway. In 1992, he graduated from the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts and went on to study at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht from 1992 to 1993.

Today, Melgaard’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among others.

See also Colorful art by Ian Davenport HERE!