ArtistNorwegian
Bjarne Engebret
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Bjarne Engebret was born on 5 November 1905 in Kristiania and came of age as a painter during one of the most turbulent periods in Norwegian art. He trained initially under Bjorn Smith-Hald and Torstein Torsteinson before entering the State Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, where he studied under Axel Revold from approximately 1930 to 1932. Revold, who had himself studied under Henri Matisse, was a decisive influence on Engebret's early instinct toward bold color and simplified form. Engebret first exhibited at the Autumn Exhibition in 1928 and continued showing there across the following decades.
In the early 1930s, Engebret aligned himself with a group of Norwegian painters who looked toward contemporary German painting for models of radical modernism. His work from this period is marked by unmodulated color fields, strong contour, and a deliberate rejection of tonal illusionism. By 1935 he had moved into fully non-figurative work, showing abstract paintings at Kunstnernes Hus in what was at the time an unusually uncompromising position for a Norwegian painter. He also received applied art commissions during this period: he decorated the Tostrupkjelleren restaurant in 1934 and the KNA restaurant in 1937, the latter destroyed during the Second World War.
From the late 1930s onward, Engebret's work shifted toward more legible subject matter, though it never settled into conventional realism. He painted figures, interiors, outdoor scenes, and workers with a constructive economy - composing the picture plane into faceted zones of color that recalled the approach of his contemporary Harald Dal. The painting 'Trær, Sagene' (1948), shown at the Autumn Exhibition that year, is considered one of the clearest expressions of this mature phase: tightly organized, frontally structured, and stripped of any decorative softening. Between 1940 and 1961 he ran a private painting school in Oslo, where he passed on this approach to a generation of younger artists.
Engebret held solo exhibitions at Kunstnerforbundet in 1942 and at Kunstnernes Hus in 1956, 1964, and 1967. His work entered several major public collections, including the Nasjonalmuseet (which holds at least seven works, among them 'Komposisjon', 'Slattekarer', and 'Kvinner pa stranden'), Rolf Stenersens Samling, Oslo kommunes kunstsamlinger, and Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden. The breadth of institutional representation confirms his standing within the Norwegian modernist canon, even if he remains less widely recognized outside specialist circles than some of his contemporaries.
At auction, Engebret's work surfaces almost exclusively at Norwegian houses. On Auctionist, 12 of the 13 items in the database have appeared at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, with one lot at Nyborgs Auksjoner. The titles span his various phases: 'Circus 1937' from the abstract-leaning interwar years, 'From Kampen 1942' and 'Interiør med figur 1944-45' from the wartime period, and 'Trær - Sagene 1948' and 'Hus og jorder 1950' from the postwar constructive phase. The highest recorded price in our database is NOK 15,000 for 'Trær - Sagene 1948', a result that reflects both the art-historical significance of that particular work and the generally modest scale of his market. Internationally, Blomqvist has recorded results into six figures in NOK for his paintings.