Viking Jupiter Art Collection

THE RESTAURANT | DECK 2

THE RESTAURANT | DECK 2 OLAV CHRISTOPHER JENSSEN 1954 • NORWAY • TRIPTYCH Norwegian artist Olav Christopher Jenssen is considered one of Scandinavia’s most important living artists. He is best known for his large-scale abstract paintings, but his artistic works also include small watercolors, drawings and large sculptural installations made from aluminum, clay and plaster. Since the mid-1980s, Jenssen has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany, and has established a significant international career. In 1992, he was the first Norwegian artist chosen to exhibit at the prestigious Documenta IX exhibition in Kassel, Germany. His work is also represented among the permanent collections of prominent museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Jenssen is seen as a renewer of abstract painting and as a key figure in the reestablishment of the genre in the contemporary art scene. Along with his fresh interest in formalism, he is celebrated for his consistently innovative and energetic style. As an artist, Jenssen continuously explores his own expression within the genre of abstract painting, pursuing a formal expression with an emphasis on purely picturesque and procedural means. His work engages an expressionist palette of secondary colors—the curious and unconventional uses of fluorescent pinks, pallid tan browns, piercing yellows and deep forest greens. While his work regularly involves dense layers of paint worked onto the canvas, Jenssen will sometimes finish a piece with a single line gesture, turning it at once into a playful and intimate gesture of human experience. In some series, Jenssen explores the paradoxical qualities of spontaneity and restraint, producing works that are simultaneously deliberate and whimsical, comingling illusory and material landscapes. In still others, he fully dispenses with exploring spatial depth, as if it is all about investigating the surface of the image as accurately as possible. With intuitive sensitivity, Jenssen constructs layers upon layers to depict the space between language and the pictorial. Through this multilayered process, Jenssen achieves a translucent depth of field, overlaying organic forms, smears, scratches and scribbles. As a rule, his works are developed in series, focusing on specific formal constructs and geometric patterns. They are both spontaneous and tender, employing a kind of automatic writing style that retains its inherent lyricism. Driven by curiosity, acute intuition and a steadfast passion for painting, Jenssen exemplifies a contemporary artist who is informed but unhindered by his precursors. Jenssen’s works on paper play a central role in the development of his art—the simple and direct formal expressions, with playful and poetic lines and colors in many cases forming both the inspiration and formal starting point for his paintings. 56

ANDALUSIA | 2017