KunstenaarNorwegian
Gundersen, Gunnar S.
1 actieve items
Gunnar S. Gundersen was born on 25 December 1921 in Førde, in the Sogn og Fjordane region of western Norway, and died on 16 January 1983. He is regarded as one of the central figures in Norwegian post-war modernism and one of the very few Scandinavian artists to work consistently within the tradition of Concrete art.
He began his formal training at Statens Håndverks- og Kunstindustriskole (SHKS) in Oslo and continued at Statens Kunstakademi, where he studied under Aage Storstein in the years immediately after Norway's liberation. Extended study periods in Paris proved formative, connecting him to the European currents of geometric abstraction. He encountered the work of Auguste Herbin, Serge Poliakoff, and Victor Vasarely, and drew particular inspiration from the Danish Concrete painter Richard Mortensen -- placing himself alongside Olle Bonniér and Olle Bærtling in Sweden as the Nordic practitioners of this discipline.
Gundersen debuted at the Norwegian Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen) in 1947 with a painting and two etchings. Three years later he held his first solo exhibition at Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo. From the 1950s onward he developed a fully non-figurative formal language built on precisely bounded geometric fields of color, later evolving toward what became known as his iris technique -- a method of creating smooth chromatic transitions that produced a quietly metallic luminosity in the surface of the work.
Painting and printmaking ran in parallel throughout his career. He produced an extensive body of serigraphs and screenprints alongside his oil and acrylic canvases. A significant part of his output consisted of large-scale wall paintings commissioned for public buildings in Norway, carried out between 1950 and 1980 and representing some of his most ambitious spatial thinking.
His work was shown at the Bergen Festival and at the Venice Biennale in 1968, one of the signal international recognitions of his career. Works by Gundersen are held in the collection of Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, which documents paintings, drawings, and prints from across his working life. In 2018, Gunnar S. Galleriet opened in Høyanger -- the municipality in western Norway where he spent formative years -- housing around thirty works from approximately 1950 to 1980.
At auction, Gundersen's compositions have reached 850,000 NOK, with his 1950s and early 1960s canvases among the most sought-after. The majority of his auction presence is concentrated at Norwegian houses, particularly Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner and Blomqvist.