Kåre Øijord
A man, his time and his landscape

Kåre Øijord (1921-2016) was a significant artist living in Drammen. His painting is in the great French-inspired tradition where spontaneous brushwork, fresh use of color, great empathy for the subject and a way of painting where the painter with body and soul interacted with the motifs and created very vital and expressive images. Øijord was a student of Jean Heiberg, who like Henrik Sørensen had been a student of Henri Matisse himself in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.

Kåre Øijord painted pictures of places and his completed modern painting interpreted landscapes as creations that radiated spirit and life. It is no longer so common to talk about "spirit" and "soul", but in Kåre Øijord's case it becomes flat and on the verge of meaningless not to involve the whole person as he lives in the tension between heaven and earth, between heaven and heaven. . Kåre Øijord had one of the deepest and most gruesome experiences a human being in Europe could have in the 20th century. As a student during World War II, he was arrested and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Seeing human evil right in the white clothes gave the young artist a sense of bottomless anxiety and certainty about the destructive in history. He chose to confront himself with the experience portrayed in pictures made both in the concentration camp and in the years that followed the liberation. But instead of perishing in the face of the deepest, he chose four landscapes, where he let the beauty of nature and the forces of life fill him. His mature art is a visionary art in which he expressed wonder, joy and delight over hills and trees, hills and water, clouds and sun-shining appearances against the blue. He chose the light, and it gets for us who see it its meaning through the distance to the dark soundtrack we must experience his mature art from.

The exhibition will show works from his entire production and both the exhibition and catalog essay will be structured according to the leap and choice from the dark depths to the celestial beauty.

Curator of the exhibition is Åsmund Thorkildsen, who will also write an essay on Øijord's art in the catalog that will accompany the exhibition.

Monday to Friday 11.00 - 15.00

Wednesday 11.00 – 18.00

Saturday 11.00 – 16.00 (free admission)

Sunday 11.00 – 16.00


OPENING HOURS DURING EASTER: open every day from 11.00-15.00