KunstenaarNorwegian
Per Kleiva
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Per Kleiva was born on 1 April 1933 in Torsken municipality in Troms, Norway, the son of schoolteacher Ivar Kleiva and Frida Pettersen. He grew up across several parts of Norway before pursuing formal art training at multiple institutions. He studied under Per Krohg at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts from 1955 to 1957, then under Niels Lergaard at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1959. He also spent time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and from 1961 to 1965 he worked as an assistant to the painter Sigurd Winge.
Kleiva made his debut at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo in 1963. His early work was influenced by jazz and American pop art, and his 1965 painting Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, named after a jazz standard, pointed toward the direction his practice would take. The decisive shift came when he encountered silk-screen printing, a technique that allowed him to produce work at a scale and price accessible to ordinary people. He called these works skillingstrykk, shilling prints, and the democratic ambition behind them shaped the rest of his career.
In the late 1960s, Kleiva co-founded the Norwegian artist collective GRAS together with Anders Kjaer, Willibald Storn, Victor Lind, and Morten Krogh. The group was rooted in pop art but pushed it in an explicitly political direction, using prints as tools for social critique and collective action. GRAS opposed American involvement in Vietnam, supported indigenous Sami rights, and aligned with socialist movements both in Norway and internationally.
The work for which Kleiva is best known is American Butterflies from 1971. The silkscreen shows US military helicopters over burning Vietnamese terrain, but with transparent butterfly wings replacing the rotor blades. The image has become one of the most widely recognized examples of Norwegian protest art. Other significant works include Samisk bustad from 1980, produced in support of Sami self-determination during the conflict over the Alta hydropower dam. From 1987 to 1993 he served as professor at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts. He died on 17 September 2017.
On the auction market, Kleiva's work is traded predominantly in Norway, with Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo handling 87 of the 89 items currently indexed on Auctionist. American Butterflies dominates the top of the price range, with three recorded sales between 150,000 and 165,000 NOK. The concentration of results at one house and the strong performance of the 1971 silkscreens indicate a stable collector base for his political graphic work in Norway.