ArtistNorwegianb.1924–d.1994
Lars Tiller
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Lars Johan Tiller was born on 28 February 1924 in the Møllenberg neighbourhood of Trondheim, the third of four siblings in a working-class district where craftsmen and civil servants lived alongside factory workers. He encountered professional art early, through Trondhjems Kunstforening's permanent gallery, and his older brother Kåre - later an architect - introduced him to amateur painting at home. By the time he finished his gymnasium studies in 1944, his decision to become an artist was firm.
His formal training began with NTH professor Harald Krohg Stabell, who ran a private art school in Trondheim. In late 1945 Tiller moved to Thorvald Slettebak's atelier, and when the Kunstskolen i Trondheim opened in January 1946 he was among its first students. That same summer he debuted publicly, with his painting "Aften" accepted at the Trondhjems Kunstforening summer exhibition and praised by critics. By autumn 1946 he had gained entry to Statens kunstakademi in Oslo, where he studied under Per Krogh and then for three years under Jean Heiberg, alongside sculptural work with Per Palle Storm.
In spring 1951, on a stipend from Trondheim municipality, Tiller went to Paris and spent four months at Fernand Leger's art school. Leger's combination of formal rigour, social engagement, and rejection of decorative superfluity made a deep impression, and Tiller returned in 1952 together with his future wife, the Swedish painter Gudrun Roos, whom he married in Paris that summer. Leger wished Tiller to stay on as an assistant, but he returned to Trondheim. The influence of those Paris studies shaped the contours of his subsequent geometric language, though Tiller himself remarked: "I suppose I am a Cubist who never painted Cubism."
In 1954 he was appointed to a permanent position at the Institute for Form and Colour at the Faculty of Architecture, NTH, teaching freehand drawing to architecture students. This position gave him both financial security and contact with a network of like-minded artists. By 1961 he had co-founded Gruppe 5 alongside Ramon Isern, Håkon Bleken, Roar Wold, and Halvdan Ljøsne - a group committed to building painting through pure constructive and formal means. Tiller was, in the words of Bleken, the most archetypal Gruppe 5 painter. The group exhibited together through twelve shared shows before its dissolution in 1970, and its retrospective presence continued into the 1990s.
Tiller's mature painting was built on a vocabulary of rectangles, squares, and trapezoids rendered without ruler-straight edges, creating spatial relationships between overlapping and offset planes. He mixed pigment with PVA glue from the late 1950s, giving his surfaces a range from thick relief to thin washes. His work entered the collections of the Nasjonalgalleriet, Riksgalleriet, Bergen Billedgalleri, Oslo kommunes kunstsamlinger, Jämtlands Läns samlinger, and Norway's embassies in New York and elsewhere. In 1991 he received Trondheim kommunes kulturpris. A hereditary Parkinson-like condition forced him to give up painting in the early 1980s, after which he turned fully to serigraphy, collaborating with younger colleagues to translate his collages into silkscreen prints until the year of his death, 23 November 1994.
On the Nordic auction market, Tiller's work has appeared primarily at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, which has handled 21 of the 22 lots recorded in Auctionist's database. Top prices reflect serious collecting interest: "By the Harbour 1967", an oil on canvas at 70x100 cm, sold for 170,000 NOK, while "Composition I 1958" achieved 150,000 NOK and "Still Life with Vase, Jars and Brushes 1955" 135,000 NOK. Prices across the market range from early abstract oils to the serigraphs he produced in his final decade, giving collectors entry at multiple levels.