Olav Strømme

Strømme trained at Statens Handverk- og Kunstindustriskole in Oslo from 1929 to 1930, then spent half a year at Statens Kunstakademi under the painter Axel Revold in 1930–31. Revold's open pedagogical approach gave him latitude to pursue an unusually independent artistic path at an early age.

Alongside fellow students Bjarne Engebret, Erling Enger, Gert Jynge, and Sigurd Winge, Strømme formed part of a generation that actively rejected the conservative mainstream of Norwegian painting. They looked instead to the international avant-garde: Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, and German Expressionism all left traces in Strømme's work of the 1930s. His pictures from that decade, including the celebrated herring-motif paintings such as Sildesteng (Catch of Herring, c. 1937) and Byen (The City), are now regarded as among the most distinctive in twentieth-century Norwegian art. They are characterised by rough, plastic surfaces, a severely restricted palette, and a mood that frequently edges toward the bleak and melancholy, circling themes of death and transience.

In the late summer of 1935 the five artists showed together at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, presenting 236 works across oil, gouache, woodcut, pastel, and drawing. Strømme's first solo exhibition followed in 1938. He participated in the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, where his work attracted attention from an international audience. Despite this early recognition, he remained somewhat outside the Norwegian art establishment for much of his career.

A major retrospective at the Bergen Festival and Henie-Onstad Art Center in 1975 finally brought him the sustained institutional attention his work merited, establishing him firmly as his generation's foremost representative of abstract visual language in Norway. Shortly before his death he completed the monumental decoration of Furuset T-banestasjon in Oslo (1978), a 130-metre platform-wall painting titled Fra lys til mørke (From Light to Dark), one of the most ambitious works of public art in the Oslo metro system. It was completed on 10 January 1978; Strømme died four months later.

His work is held by the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo (30 published works), Rolf E. Stenersens samling, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, and Henie-Onstad Art Center.

On the auction market, Strømme's work appears almost exclusively through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for all 33 lots in the Auctionist database. Top results include Nattlig bybilde at 75,000 NOK, Kysset at 70,000 NOK, and Still Life with Violin (1933) at 62,000 NOK, reflecting consistent collector interest in his major figural and urban compositions.