KunstenaarNorwegian
Kjell Nupen
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Kjell Nupen was born on 5 September 1955 in Kristiansand, Norway. He entered Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo at the age of 17, an unusually young admission, studying from 1972 to 1975 under painters including Ludvig Eikaas, Reidar Aulie, and Knut Rose. He then moved to Dusseldorf and spent a year at the Staatliche Kunstakademie under Gerhard Richter, K.O. Gotz, and Rolf Sackheim. Before he was 20, institutions were already acquiring his work.
In his early career, Nupen worked with figurative imagery and the human form. During the 1980s the figure gradually withdrew from his canvases, replaced by motifs drawn from landscape and interior space, rooms, passages, horizons. His paintings grew increasingly abstract, organized around expansive color fields that carry a strong atmospheric charge. The color most associated with him, Nupenblatt, is an intense dark blue with undertones of turquoise, evoking depth, sea, and a quality of night sky.
Nupen worked across media, painting, graphic art, sculpture, ceramic, glass, steel, and bronze, though he consistently described himself as a painter first. His glass commissions brought his color sensibility into architectural space at a large scale. These include painted glass paintings, altar panels, and crucifixes for Som Church in Kristiansand (2004), windows for Geilo Kulturkirke and Olsvik Church in Bergen, and the historic Broerenkerk in Zwolle, the Netherlands. In 2012 he won an international competition for the decoration of Viborg City Hall in Denmark.
In 2011, Nupen co-founded the Foundation for the Queen Sonja Nordic Art Award together with Queen Sonja and artists Ornulf Opdahl and Ole Larsen. After his death from cancer on 12 March 2014, the award's inspirational grant was named the Kjell Nupen Memorial Grant in his honor.
At auction, Nupen's market is centered firmly at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which has handled 84 of the 95 lots recorded. His auction record stands at 190,000 NOK for Overpainted postcard 2009. Works regularly sell above 100,000 NOK, with Flying over water reaching 175,000 NOK and Passage/II Parallel 150,000 NOK.