ArtistNorwayb.1933–d.2013
Per Ung
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Born in Oslo on 5 June 1933, Per Ung trained under Per Palle Storm at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts from 1952 to 1955, receiving a thorough grounding in the figurative sculpture tradition that had shaped Norwegian public art since the nineteenth century. That foundation proved durable, but Ung was not content to stay within it. In 1960 he studied with Anthony Caro at St. Martin's School of Art in London - an encounter with one of the period's most rigorous advocates for sculpture freed from pedestal and narrative. The tension between those two poles, the classical figurative and the modernist formal, runs through much of his subsequent work.
Ung built one of the most publicly visible careers in postwar Norwegian sculpture. His first major commission, a portrait statue of actress Johanne Dybwad, was erected outside the National Theatre in Oslo in 1962 and set a pattern: over the following decades he produced a sequence of figures that became part of the physical fabric of the city. Sonja Henie, the Olympic skating champion, was cast in bronze outside Frogner Stadium in 1985. The composer Johan Halvorsen and the beloved actress Wenche Foss joined the National Theatre forecourt in 2002 and 2007 respectively. That same year Ung unveiled his statue of wartime resistance hero Gunnar Sønsteby on Karl Johans gate, portraying him at twenty-five beside his bicycle in a work that combined precise historical observation with a natural, unheroic stillness.
Outside Oslo, his most widely seen work may be the "Fiskarkona" (Fisherman's Wife), a 4.5-metre bronze completed in 1999 that stands at the end of the breakwater at the entrance to Svolvær harbour in Lofoten. The figure distils in monumental scale something Ung returned to repeatedly in smaller-format bronzes: the body in a state of expectation or emotional openness, held still against wind and weather. Works such as "Eros and Psyche" (Adamstuen, Oslo, 1982), where the female figure appears to float free of the ground, show the formal ambition that runs alongside his more civic portrait work.
He was chairman of the Norwegian Association of Sculptors (Norsk Billedhuggerforening) and served on the board of Kunstnernes Hus from 1967 to 1969. In 1995 he received the Ingeborg og Per Palle Storms ærespris, and in 2007 he was appointed Knight First Class in the Order of St. Olav. The Nasjonalmuseet holds works from his hand. He died of cancer in Oslo on 20 June 2013.
On the secondary market, Ung's bronzes have appeared primarily through Norwegian auction houses. Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo accounts for the large majority of sales tracked on Auctionist, alongside Nyborgs Auksjoner. Top recorded prices include 210,000 NOK for "The Embrace", 200,000 NOK each for "Miller Boy" and "The Hug", and 190,000 NOK for "Embrace". Intimate figurative bronzes, particularly works exploring bodily contact and emotional states, consistently attract the strongest bidding.