Oil paint has been used by history's pioneers in the art of painting, but has recently renewed its topicality. This month we highlight artists who work in different ways with oil painting, both abstract and figurative.

Lars Morell (b. 1980, NO) is educated at the Oslo National Academy of Fine Arts.

Over the past few years, Lars Morell has created a complex and diverse body of work consisting of photographs, sculptures, and installations. Morell’s work has always encompassed and questioned the visible/invisible and what seems to be something that it is not. In numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally this iconography has been thoroughly developed, and in his recent works distorted shapes, which now “grow” over the canvas, are constructed from imagery in his previous works – paintings, sculptures and drawings. We see colored constructs that at first glance are reminiscent of branching root systems; we recognize the outlines of chains and hooks – and thus again objects that are used in illusion and deception. Morell develops these works out of figuration and sees them as distorted still lives, as a dilemma between abstraction and representational painting.

Morells works is in numerous private collections as well as the Caviar Factory Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, Sørlandet Art Museum, Equinor and KLP.

Elin Brissman (b. 1982, SE) is educated at the Art Academy in Bergen.

She paints photorealistic windows, doors and house facades. In her works, no action or people are shown, only worn surfaces, walls and reflections in the glass. Details in a windowsill can give a vague idea of its anonymous inhabitant. Her works are based on places she has been, and collectively they become a collection of post-war modernist facades that most people would pass by without a glance.

Brissman is in the collection of Haugalandmuseet (NO), Art in Public Norway, Bergen City Art Collection (NO) and the University of Bergen (NO).

Ole Martin Lund Bø (b. 1973, Stavanger) has studied graphic design in Stavanger (BA 1993) as well as fine art at the Art Academy in Bergen (BFA 2002).

These two fields of interest are still very much apparent in his practice. Lund Bø’s paintings are geometric and expressive compositions inspired by nature – trees and mountains can be discerned in front of or behind graphic elements of strong colour fields: “I paint. For me, new reflections arise when what is not recognizable meets what already is. The turning point between affiliation and seeing something for the first time, creates a space which interests me.” Today Lund Bø is mostly known as a painter, however he has over the years also worked with highly interesting approaches to sculpture, installation and photography. His recent paintings are a culmination of years of visual experience, where his lightness of touch and playful approach result in strong and intuitive paintings.

Lund Bø has been purchased by private and public collections, e.g. Bergen Art Museum, Statoil Art Program, Stavanger Art Museum and Baroness Jean Von Oppenheim.