Olav Christopher Jenssen

The Norwegian painter Olav Christopher Jenssen (b. 1954) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and in Lya, Sweden. He graduated from Oslo’s art academy in 1981 and went on to do further studies in New York and Berlin. Today Jenssen is professor at Braunschweig University of Fine Arts in Germany. He has also taught at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, a professorial position he inherited from Sigmar Polke.

Jenssen has an international reputation for his work in the field of abstract painting. His big breakthrough came in 1992 at Documenta IX. With a visual language under continuous development, in the course of his artistic practice Jenssen has migrated from figuration (in the ‘80s) to various abstract expressions, sometimes organic, other times geometric, but always with emphasis on colour, space, surface and materiality. This artist’s non-figurative paintings are characterized by energetic, intense colours and complex surface treatments. The colours range from being bright and harsh, almost fluorescent, to milder pastel tones. The compositions and colour fields could be associated with landscape elements, e.g., horizons and mountains. Jenssen has talked about an inner landscape all people carry inside themselves, like a childhood memory, but he is not interested in explaining his paintings and stresses that the best way to explain one’s own paintings is to paint them.

Jenssen tends to work in series; he immerses himself in a theme or pictorial expression for a sustained time period. This is how the named series end up defining his various painting styles. Lackmus Painting No. 1 (2004), included in Rotations #2, is from the series Lackmus Paintings. It was first exhibited in 2005 at Galerie Conrads in Düsseldorf. Here we can identify several hallmarks of the painterly style. The background’s abstract green and blue shapes seem like elements in a landscape, woods and clouds for instance. Over this Jenssen has painted a good many sharply-contrasting round forms. The 'blobs', sometimes several millimetres thick, give the work the character of a relief – not sculpted but painted. This complex surface treatment recalls Bjarne Melgaard’s pastose works where paint is squeezed directly from tubes onto the canvas.

Other painters represented in Rotations #2, who, like Jenssen, are rooted in a painterly tradition of abstraction, form, surface and colour, are the COBRA artists Karel Appel and Asger Jorn, and the Norwegian painters Bjørn Sigurd Tufta and Thorbjørn Sørensen. Yet where Tufta and Sørensen’s abstract languages are more reductive, controlled and geometric, Jenssen’s expression in Lackmus Painting No. 1 has greater expressivity and spontaneity. It seems actually to be more in line with Appel and Jorn’s ideas about 'spontaneous abstraction'.

TK