KunstenaarNorwegian
Håkon Gullvåg
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Hakon Gullvag started painting at twelve when he found his grandfather's paint box in a family attic. His parents recognised the commitment and bought him oil paint. By seventeen he was enrolled by special permission at Trondheim Art Academy, where he studied under Georg Suttner and John Anton Risan. Suttner, who had particular significance for Gullvag's early development, instilled a discipline of observation that would anchor the figurative core of his practice even as his work moved through abstraction and back again over the decades.
Gullvag made his public breakthrough at Gallery Dobloug in Oslo in 1983. That first showing established the terms of his reputation: a painter who could move between intimate figuration and large-scale narrative composition, always working with a facility that made the technical demands look effortless. He was born on 20 February 1959 in Trondheim and has remained one of Norway's most consistently exhibited artists since that debut.
His range is genuinely wide. He has produced portraits, mythological scenes, politically charged figurative work, graphic prints in lithography and other techniques, and a substantial body of ecclesiastical art. His portraits of the Norwegian royal family are among the best known: the official portraits of King Harald V and Queen Sonja hung in Oslo City Hall and later in the small banquet hall of the Royal Palace, each taking nine months to complete. He also painted the altarpiece for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land in 2014, part of an ecclesiastical practice that since 1995 has become a defining strand of his career.
The most politically direct work of his career is the Terra Sancta series, forty-two large-format paintings made as a direct response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza in winter 2008 to 2009. He painted them as a tribute to the children of Gaza. The exhibition opened at Trondheim Art Museum in 2009 and toured to the UNESCO Palace in Beirut, the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, and the Centre Culturel Francais in Damascus. The combination of figurative imagery and political witness placed him in a tradition of painters who treat public events as the legitimate subject of art.
Major Norwegian institutions including the National Museum hold his work. His graphic output, particularly lithographs, has been produced and collected in parallel with his paintings throughout his career, and appears regularly at Nordic auction. At auction on Auctionist, Gullvag has 54 items. His work appears through Blomqvist, where a painting titled "Bikkjelue" sold for 72,000 NOK, and his record price stands at around 15,197 USD for the work "Rovdyr" also at Blomqvist. Paintings trade at significantly higher levels than his prints, which reach the market more frequently and at more accessible prices.