Odd Nerdrum: The Drawings
by Odd Nerdrum, Richard Vine, Edgar John Bullard
Category: Artists

Calling himself an "historical anarchist", Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum has rejected the modernist development in art of the past 100 years. Embracing the traditional values and techniques of the old masters, particularly Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Nerdrum creates a mythic Nordic world of barren landscapes populated with what appear to be lonely survivors of a lost civilization. His constant theme is that of estrangement -- of man from the world, from his fellows, from himself. Nerdrum repeatedly portrays a longing for reconciliation that can only be described as religious in intensity. A dual strangeness pervades these graphic works. Executed for the most part between 1985 and 1993, they reveal a desolate view of the human situation which the sumptuousness of their execution subtly contradicts. This coupling of a forlorn vision with a paradoxical faith in technical virtuosity and artistic tradition stems from his rejection of modernism, both as a style and as a progressive creed.