Odd, Odder, Odd Nerdrum

MutualArt invites you on a hauntingly weird exploration of one of the most peculiar artists alive today, who unsettles and provokes, and draws pilgrims to the Norwegian countryside.

Odd Nerdrum, Three Singers, Oil on Canvas, 82.5" x 102"

It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a Los Angeles winter, there appeared at Patrick Painter Gallery a show of paintings by one of the world’s most notorious figurative painters, remarkable for the singularity of his works, and of the man himself.

Like a character supernaturally cast from a retro-gothic novel set in the dangerous days of early science, Odd Nerdrum fashions himself in a linen smock and robes, rough leather vestments and draped furs. He resembles the characters in his paintings, described by the uninitiated as archaic, or post-apocalyptic. His sons and wife share the peculiarly hand-made sartorial tastes of the pater familias of the clan, theatrical in dress, the sons more Byronic, and when he makes a public appearance he is trailed by his acolyte fans, who tail behind the master like medieval cos-play devotees. Nerdrum himself has been costumed thus so long that it has become habitual and has not a hint of affectation.

A publicity still of Odd Nerdrum in his black robe.

For years, exiled from his home while the silent agents of the Norwegian government pursued him for failing to provide them with their take of the wealth his art provided, his cavalcade dwelled among the black volcanic extrusions and steaming springs of frozen Iceland, where for half the year the night is full, and he painted strange imagery composed upon geometric patterns, as if to illustrate the rituals and incantations of some esoteric secret society. Even his clouds formed occult shapes and presented themselves as mysteries to be solved. The stories the paintings told were of naked men striding in step through barren Thule landscapes, assailed by snakes as they sang; of men sitting in patterned order in an icy wasteland, with their mouths open and heads cast back, waiting for a drop of rain to fall and assuage their thirst; of wrapped refugees either dead or sleeping, lips pulled back to expose vampiric teeth. Perhaps they were under the eldritch influence of the draugar, the undead of the burial mounds of Viking myth, which driven by avarice and envy for the living, sinisterly invade dreams and haunt homes.

Odd Nerdrum, Dawn, Oil on Canvas, 75 ⅛" by 111 ⅜"

After Iceland the clan moved to the city of light, where they worked and lived in a crumbling and haunted Parisian château, where sleeping guests were visited in the darkness by a door-handle-rattling poltergeist, which smashed mirrors, flipped chairs and one night poured impossibly materializing water over a visitor chopping wood in the cellar. Mysterious chamber music played in the heart of the ghostly night from an invisible source. A boy dressed in the clothes of a century ago appeared and disappeared in the garden.

If postmodern painters are recognizable for their irony and distaste for grand narratives, for rejecting modernism, for their self-referentiality and their moral relativism, and for their irreverence, then Nerdrum is the perfect specimen. He paints in antique style, as if possessed by the ghosts of Rembrandt and Apelles, but hallucinating memories of the aftermath of an apocalyptic war and insists that these are timeless paintings. He paints images that provoke and unsettle even his most devoted admirers: notorious paintings of women defecating; gory horse decapitations; self-portraits with a battered, bleeding face, lurching from his plague bed, suffering from hepatitis, spreading a golden robe to expose an ambitious erection; hermaphrodites; nothing’s shocking. He is legendary for his insistence that he is not an artist, but a kitsch-painter, and utterly rejects the conventions and expectations of the conventional art world, although the price he has paid for decades of hostility toward the critics has been a black strain of indulgent self-pity that seeps from his work. But Nerdrum is a true genius, and even his moments of narcissism are a conventional person’s wonder.

Odd Nerdrum, After the Flood, oil on canvas, 81.5” x 117”  

The millenarian turn of the century failed to produce an adequate apocalypse, and Nerdrum’s perceived persecution became a reality when he was accused of tax evasion in 2012. With an international investigation and trial underway his melancholy paintings turned almost cheerful, and his postdiluvian refugees began a nearly blissful life, finding an eerie reconciliation with the hostile landscape. They bathed in hot springs, nurtured and protected and embraced babies. Some learned how to project themselves into the astral realm. In 2014 he was found guilty and convicted to a 20-month prison sentence.

Odd Nerdrum, Quick Born, oil on canvas, 68” x 84”

Now, death has returned to the refugee world. The snake has struck lethal poison into the veins of another victim, and an open-mouthed and weeping father wearing a carapace headcloth clutches the dead boy, his distraught bow cast alongside a pair of thin and struggling weeds. The viper is held in the lifeless hand of his grey son. In the distance, tall, solitary figures are isolated against the horizon, waiting, like angels of death. A becalmed boat drifts in the still water beside the rocky shoreline.

Odd Nerdrum, Man with Rock, oil on canvas, 53.5” x 52.5”

Nerdrum remembered both his self-sympathy and his favorite subject when he cast himself as an exhausted Sisyphean Man With Rock, and a tall, solitary figure appeared behind him. Nerdrum has always played the prophet in the wilderness. Now transfiguration awaits.

Odd Nerdrum: After the Flood 
Patrick Painter Gallery
1820 Industrial Street, Los Angeles
January 18 - February 18, 2020

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