ArtistNorwegian-Swedish
Kjartan Slettemark
0 active items
Born on 6 August 1932 in Naustdal, a small coastal community in western Norway, Kjartan Slettemark spent his early adulthood moving between vocational training, military service and an uneasy relationship with formal art education. He took a telecom operator course in Lillehammer, completed military service with the German Brigade in Regensburg, and eventually tried his hand at art school - finding academic structures poorly suited to what he actually wanted to make. By the early 1960s he had settled in Stockholm, taking Swedish citizenship in 1966, and the city would remain his home for the rest of his life.
His breakthrough came in 1965, when he placed a collage in front of the Norwegian parliament titled "On reports from Vietnam: Children are doused with burning napalm, their skin is charred black and they die." The work combined a red mouth, an American flag and the figure of a child, and it drew enough controversy to require police protection after being vandalized multiple times. The episode established him as a figure willing to use art as direct political intervention, and academic historians have since analyzed it as a pivotal moment in Scandinavian protest art.
The work for which he is most widely recognized internationally is the Nixon Visions series of the early 1970s. In 1974, Slettemark submitted a passport application in Stockholm with a photograph he had manipulated to replace his own face with Richard Nixon's - framed by his own beard - and the Swedish authorities issued it without detecting the substitution. He then sold the story as an exclusive to all six major Swedish daily newspapers, each of which ran the passport image on their front pages in July 1974. The passport became both a physical artwork and a performance act, exposing the bureaucratic systems that confer identity and legitimacy.
His practice ranged well beyond the passport work. He founded Kjartanistan, a non-territorial state with the entire planet as its capital and himself as prime minister, issuing approximately 500 passports to interested citizens. In 2003 he produced "Self-portrait with Marilyn," a series of collages staging himself as Marilyn Monroe in the style of Andy Warhol, which he presented upon receiving an award from the Swedish Academy of Fine Arts - reportedly wearing the costume during the ceremony. He is described as Scandinavia's first performance artist and an early practitioner of what became known as trash art and conceptual art.
Slettemark's work is held at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo (Nasjonalmuseet), and in other Nordic public collections. He received the Arts Council Norway Honorary Award in 2001. He died on 13 December 2008 in Stockholm.
At auction his work appears primarily through Norwegian and Swedish houses. On Auctionist, 17 lots have been recorded, including a painting from the Nixon Visions series that sold for 80,000 NOK and a Self-Portrait as Marilyn at 30,000 NOK. The strongest demand comes through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which has handled the majority of his lots, followed by Stockholms Auktionsverk and Bukowskis in Stockholm.