ArtistNorwegian
Killi-Olsen, Kjell Erik
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Kjell Erik Killi Olsen was born on 23 July 1952 in Trondheim and grew up in a Norway still absorbing the aftershocks of post-war modernism. His education was itinerant and eclectic: he began at Kunstskolen i Trondheim in 1972 with a strong interest in scenography and theater, then moved to the Akademia Sztuk Pieknych in Krakow, Poland in 1978, where he encountered a tradition of theatrical avant-garde associated with Tadeusz Kantor and Andrzej Wajda. From 1979 he attended the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo under Knut Rose before leaving after one year - along with fellow students Olav Christopher Jenssen and Therese Nordtvedt - to enroll at the Art Students League in New York.
The theatrical and performative qualities absorbed in Krakow proved formative. Through the early 1980s, Killi Olsen developed a visual language of distorted, carnivalesque humanoid figures that flickered between painting and object. By the mid-decade, his figures had literally climbed out of the canvas: first as reliefs, then as free-standing sculptures attached to or hovering near the painted surface, and finally as fully independent works of fiberglass and paper-mache. The figures are grotesque in the precise sense - exaggerated, porous between human and animal, funny and unsettling in the same moment.
In 1986 he held a solo exhibition at the Galeria Salvatore Ala in Milan, and exhibited the same year at the Venice Biennale. The commission that would define his international reputation came in 1989: Norway sent Killi Olsen to the São Paulo Biennale with "Salamandernatten" (Night of the Salamander), an installation of 72 fiberglass and paper-mache sculptures seen by more than 600,000 visitors in Brazil. The work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in Campinas, and when it was brought back to Norway by sea in 2005 for the retrospective "Begynnelsen" at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, the artist personally restored the weathered figures before reinstalling them at Høvikodden.
Killi Olsen has split his time between Oslo and Château de Fontarèches in southern France, a division that surfaces in work drawing on Mediterranean light and mythology alongside Nordic material. His paintings of the 1990s - including the series inspired by Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" (1993) and the large canvas "Haven med de fremmede" (1996-97) - show him returning to the picture plane with the sculptural weight his three-dimensional work had built. In 2023-24 he presented "Lost Faces" at the Queen Sonja Print Award venue, his first exhibition dedicated solely to graphic work, featuring drypoint engravings with the same grotesque economy as his sculpture.
At auction Killi Olsen appears almost exclusively at Blomqvist in Oslo, where all 21 of his recorded sales have taken place. His top result is 85,000 NOK for "Haven med de fremmede" (1996-97), a substantial canvas from his most productive decade. The market is moderate relative to his institutional standing - his work is held by the Nasjonalmuseet, KODE Bergen, and the Museum of Modern Art in Campinas - suggesting that major works rarely circulate on the secondary market.