ArtistNorwegian
Anders Kjær
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Anders Kjær was born on 20 August 1940 in Stockholm, though he grew up and built his career in Norway. Self-taught as a painter - he later studied art history, philosophy and archaeology at the University of Oslo - Kjær made his exhibition debut in 1966. The following year he showed at the Young Artists' Society spring exhibition in a sharply different register: a minimal, three-dimensional hard-edge painting that announced an artist more interested in spatial logic than expressive gesture.
Through the early 1970s, Kjær moved toward collective action. He became a member of GRAS, a Norwegian artist group formed around a shared workshop with collectively owned means of production. Silk-screen printing was central to the group's practice, and Kjær learned the technique from Per Kleiva. The demands of screen printing - precision, flat colour, clarity of form - suited his sensibility. His contribution to the GRAS portfolio in 1971, titled "Requiem," showed the portrait of Che Guevara on a dark stele against a moonlit, barren landscape. The image was characteristic: politically charged, visually clean, unmistakable in its meaning.
In 1972, Kjær collaborated with composer Kåre Kolberg on a multimedia installation called "Nova," presented at the Henie Onstad Art Centre. The work combined taped music with carefully staged lighting across a landscape of glass, rubber tyres and stacked paper that visitors could walk through - an early example of the kind of environmental, participatory work that would define much of the decade's experimental edge.
Moving to Krødsherad brought a gradual shift in Kjær's subject matter. Nature began to appear in his work with increasing weight - the fields, trees and water of inland Norway entering paintings that had previously been dominated by urban motifs and geometric form. Through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, he developed a figurative approach aligned with what critics of the period called new figuration. In 1982 he exhibited a series of paintings drawing directly on the visual language of pornography, work that attracted significant public attention and secured his name beyond the gallery circuit.
Kjær received the State's three-year working stipend in 1975 and the State guaranteed income for artists from 1987. His work is held in the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, where 19 published works appear in the collection, including the figure series "Woman I-V" and "Man II, III, V" from 1982, alongside landscape works from the late 1970s. At auction, all 27 items in the Auctionist database come from Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner. Top results include two untitled works from 1981 at 75,000 and 74,000 NOK, "Sommeren 1969" at 70,000 NOK, and "Vårsol" at 60,000 NOK - prices that position Kjær as a meaningful secondary-market figure in post-war Norwegian art.