ArtistNorwegianb.1920–d.1983
Arnold Haukeland
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When Arnold Haukeland installed 'Air' at the University of Oslo in 1962, it was the first abstract monumental sculpture ever placed in a Norwegian public space. The response was fierce: critics called it incomprehensible, traditionalists demanded something legible. Haukeland pressed on anyway.
He came to sculpture by an unconventional route. Born in Verdal in 1920, he began studying electrical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim before the German occupation redirected everything. During the war he studied clandestinely at the Illegal Academy in Oslo under Per Palle Storm and Stinius Fredriksen, and in 1946 traveled to Paris to work at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. He then spent time in the restoration studio at Nidaros Cathedral, learning stone from the inside out.
His early work was figurative. In 1947 he won a competition for a freedom monument in Sandvika with 'Friheten', a rider cast as a symbol of liberation - a work the jury called the most original idea in the competition. Through the 1950s he refined his command of the human form, but by 1958 the figurative had exhausted what he wanted to say. He pivoted sharply toward abstraction, creating large-scale compositions that challenged everything Norwegian institutional sculpture stood for at the time.
The 1961 exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus with Jakob Weidemann changed his career overnight. The show was a critical success and led to a sequence of major public commissions: 'Air' (1962), 'Dynamikk' (1966), the 'Sun Sculpture' (1970) commissioned for the Henie Onstad Art Centre by Niels Onstad in memory of Sonja Henie. The most technically ambitious of these was 'Ode to Light' (1968), a 19.5-metre outdoor sound sculpture at Storedal in Skjeberg built with composer Arne Nordheim. Fitted with built-in speakers and photocells, it reads ambient light and weather conditions and translates them into Nordheim's electroacoustic music - one of the earliest works anywhere to fuse monumental sculpture and live sound.
From 1968 to 1975 Haukeland lived and worked in Tenerife, in a studio called Casa Randi in Icod de los Vinos, where the warmer light and different scale of landscape pushed his forms in new directions. The smaller sculptures he made there revealed sides of his practice that the large public commissions had kept compressed.
He died in Baerum in 1983. His work is held by the National Museum in Oslo (Nasjonalmuseet) and the Henie Onstad Art Centre, and is represented in Norwegian public spaces from university campuses to municipal halls. On Auctionist, his sculptures appear primarily through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner and Nyborgs Auksjoner, with top auction results including 'Birds in flight' at NOK 600,000 and 'Mor og unge 1953' at NOK 120,000.