Biography
Bjarne Melgaard is a Norwegian artist currently based in New York City. Creating sensory paintings, sculptures, and installations, the artist examines psychological angst and subcultures that break taboos. Always following his mind wherever it goes, Melgaard's work ranges from a 12-foot-tall Pink Panther smoking a meth pipe to a dystopian dollhouse filled with handmade figures getting high, having sex, and contemplating suicide.
Born in Sydney in 1967 to Norwegian parents and raised in Oslo, Melgaard studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts, then at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht from 1992 to 1993. He represented his country at the 2011 Venice Biennale with Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about Aids.
Melgaard began his career in the mid-1990s with a frenetic, neo-expressionist style. His intense, almost paint-hurling approach to the canvas is combined with a total control of the line, where brushstrokes and splashes of paint form the basis of an explicit and sometimes offensive narrative.
His art deals with the darker side of humanity, such as self-destruction, deviant sexuality, and bizarre religious beliefs, often drawing inspiration from various provocative subcultures such as S&M and heavy metal music. It offers insight into the parallel worlds that coexist alongside the normal world. Through his work, Bjarne discusses, investigates, and pushes the boundaries of societal acceptance. What sets Melgaard apart is that his work does not rely on scale, high production costs, obvious symbolism, hipster hieroglyphs, or post-adolescent sexuality.
Melgaard's most famous work, Chair, created in 2013, is an appropriation of a similar 1969 piece by Allen Jones, which featured a white woman. Even then, it was controversial: feminists attacked and damaged it, seeing it as a symbol of patriarchal repression. Unlike Jones's, Melgaard's polyvinyl sculpture depicts a contorted Black woman. The artwork sparked controversy when it appeared on a fashion website, with the magazine's owner, Dasha Zhukova, sitting on the cushion. After an immediate backlash and fierce accusations of racism, the photo was removed.
His exhibitions are dense installations filled with paintings, sculptures, readymades, photographs, and contributions from friends working in art, design, or literature. Over the course of his career, Melgaard has held more than forty-five solo exhibitions in major galleries worldwide. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and international art fairs. Additionally, he is also a frequent curator and collaborator, has written over a dozen novels and produced seven films.
Over the years, his works have been included in the permanent collections of major international museums – the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to name a few.
Bjarne had his first solo exhibition in 2000. The show, held in New York, featured sculptures of monkeys engaged in explicit sexual acts, causing a huge public stir. Known for his unusual acts, he included two live caged tiger cubs in his 2012 exhibition at the Ramiken Crucible gallery on the Lower East Side. Since then, the artist has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 2011, the Lyon Biennale in 2013, and most recently the Whitney Biennial in 2014.
Held in 2013, Ignorant Transparencies is one of Melgaard's most important solo exhibitions. The exhibition included paintings, drawings, films, texts, and sculptures and consisted of three distinct gallery spaces, each telling a different story.
At the center of the first gallery is a 12-foot-tall depiction of a top-hatted, crystal meth-smoking Pink Panther, covered here and there in thick paint. As Melgaard's alter ego, the Pink Panther appears in various shapes and sizes, both as predator and imp. In addition, a mural on one wall shows the blurred image of an approaching woman above large white letters spelling out "You're a Monster Sometimes."
The second dark room, featuring tiger-themed sofas and rugs, feels like a hotel lounge in a comic book horror film, with Pink Panther characters seated in fanciful costumes holding literary and philosophical paperbacks. The third room features expressionist cartoon paintings and enlarged gay pornographic photographs on polyester banners.
For the 2014 Whitney Biennial, he created a room-sized living room populated with sex dolls and furnished with sofas alongside sculptures of deranged faces, creating an atmosphere charged with sex, violence, and societal ruin. Melgaard intends his installation to communicate the effects of what some scientists call the Anthropocene, a new geological age created by human activity, particularly global warming.
He proposes that our collective psyche has been abused and damaged in the same way as the environment, resulting in sadism and a complete disregard for humanity. Videos and images Melgaard has sourced from the so-called Deep Web are projected onto the wall—nightmarish videos taken from real life, cult-like behavior, torture, genocidal attacks, scenes of mass suicide, war, and terrorism. Overall, the installation reflects the streams of dystopian images we usually choose to ignore, forcing us to confront what Melgaard sees as the symptoms of civilization's decline.
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