ArtistSpanish-Norwegianb.1914–d.2003
Ramón Isern
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Ramon Isern Solé was born in Barcelona on 26 July 1914, and his early years were shaped as much by politics as by art. He trained at La Llotja, the city's academy of fine arts, between 1930 and 1936 - studying under sculptors whose work carried the classical warmth of Catalan noucentisme, with Aristide Maillol as the guiding spirit behind his formative figurative sensibility.
The Spanish Civil War interrupted everything. Isern fought on the Republican side, fled to France after Franco's victory, and was detained before finding brief refuge at Maillol's farm in Bagnols-sur-Mer. Deportation, a concentration camp in Burgos, and years of displacement in Madrid followed. By the time the worst of it had passed, the 1940s had consumed a decade that might otherwise have been his most productive early years.
He rebuilt his practice slowly, working in Paris on a French scholarship in 1952 and exhibiting in Barcelona in 1953. The real turning point came when he won an international sculpture competition organized by the Belgian airline Sabena. The prize brought an exhibition at the Oslo Art Association, which drew enough attention that he decided to stay. By 1956, he had settled in Trondheim, where he joined the Norwegian Institute of Technology as an adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture, becoming a full professor from 1967 until retirement.
Isern's artistic trajectory mirrors the wider postwar turn away from figuration. His early figurative bronzes - including the 1953 group "Naked in the Sun," two reclining figures now in the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo - gave way around 1958 to abstract iron sculptures assembled from scrap metal. Powerful welded forms, rough and industrial in texture, were set against slender, almost delicate elements. He was among the earliest practitioners in Norway to work with welded iron as a primary sculptural medium, and he extended the same spirit of accumulation and transformation into collage and decollage - works built from glued and torn paper, layered with political and cultural imagery.
The Nasjonalmuseet holds multiple works across these registers, from the 1958 iron sculpture "Relikvie" to collages such as "Tegneseriehelt" (1977-78) and "Til dikteren Antonio Machado" (1968), the latter a tribute to the Republican poet who died in exile. A doctoral thesis by Norwegian art historian Svein Aamold, completed in 1997, devoted itself entirely to Isern's sculpture - recognition of how fully he had embedded himself in Norwegian modernist history without ever fully leaving his origins behind.
On the auction market, Isern's work appears almost exclusively through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, Norway's specialist house for older and modern Norwegian art. All 18 items in the Auctionist database originate from that single house, with prices ranging from 1,400 NOK for smaller compositions to 18,000 NOK for the large 1972-73 work "The Gypsies Celebrate the Birth of the Messiah." The recurring titles - many listed simply as "Komposisjon" - reflect the abstract character of his mature output. Given his institutional standing and the scholarly attention his work has received, supply remains limited and prices modest relative to his historical significance.