ArtistNorwegianb.1911–d.1988
Bendik Riis
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In "Utkastelsen" (The Eviction), painted around 1958, towering police officers force a helpless family from their home while the world outside waits indifferently. It is a monumental painting rooted in autobiography, when Bendik Riis was sixteen, his own family was violently evicted due to economic hardship, and it captures everything that makes his art so compelling: raw emotional power channelled through bold colour and decorative form, personal trauma transformed into universal statement.
Bendik Arnold Riis Kristiansen (20 November 1911, 20 January 1988) was born in Fredrikstad, Norway, and died in Halden. He graduated from the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry, having apprenticed in painting and taken private instruction from local artists in Fredrikstad during the 1930s. He debuted at the Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen) in 1933 with a drawing titled "Frida," depicting a local character, executed in a realist formal language.
Riis was late to be recognised, but when recognition came it was decisive. Over the following decades, he developed into one of Norway's leading colourists, a painter whose art spans broadly from romanticism to politics, from the grotesque to the decoratively ornamental. His artistic language drew impulses from folk decorative painting and rosemaling (Norwegian rose painting), lending even his most intense subject matter a paradoxical visual beauty. Stories from his own life and family, poverty, displacement, the dignity of working people, provided recurring motifs.
Among his most significant works, "Castration" (1957) has been described by Aftenposten as one of his most important paintings, while the monumental "Utkastelsen" is held at the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo. A major retrospective exhibition, "Norge, Norge mitt Fædreneland" (Norway, Norway My Fatherland), was held at the Nasjonalmuseet in 2010, bringing together paintings and works on paper that demonstrated the full range of his artistic vision.
Riis's work is held in the collection of Norway's Nasjonalmuseet, which houses multiple paintings and drawings. His art drew from deeply Norwegian traditions while speaking to experiences that transcend borders, loss, resilience, the search for belonging.
On the auction market, Riis's work appears exclusively through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for all 225 lots tracked on Auctionist. His still lifes command the highest prices, with "Still Life: Six Pears" reaching 500,000 NOK and other works regularly achieving between 80,000 and 150,000 NOK. The concentration at a single house reflects the deeply Norwegian character of his market, while the price levels confirm his standing as a significant figure in Norwegian twentieth-century painting.