For the month of January, QB Gallery wishes to highlight artists and artworks that experiment with abstract expressions. These pieces challenge traditional representations and explore the possibilities of form, color, and composition. Abstraction opens up a world without clear narratives, inviting the viewer to experience the subjective and emotional.

The artists show how abstract art can convey ideas and moods without recognizable forms, creating a deeper connection between the artwork and the audience through visual resonance and personal interpretation.

In this selection, we are invited to explore the unknown, while the artworks challenge our perception and reflection on the potential of art. QB aims to highlight artists who, through their visual languages, create both dynamism and stillness, chaos and harmony, demonstrating that the expression of art can always be stretched further.

Sebastian Helling (b. 1975, London) received his BA from the London College of Printing (2001) and has a double MFA from the Royal College of Art in London (2003) and the Oslo Art Academy (2011).

Helling’s work with painting and drawing is neither abstract nor figurative, neither gestural nor compositional. Layers of artistic languages overlap and deny each other. In the same spirit, his wish for communication (or anti-communication) is trapped within the relevance of the artwork. What we are presented with, then, are explosive drawings and canvases with splashes of paint and text, sometimes spray painted on, at other times applied with a brush and then stroked and smudged with his fingers. It is this tension between the positive and the negative that allows him to focus his work on the final outcome rather than a specific narrative or particular reference point - rather, they are embodiments of Helling’s constant tearing apart and building back together again, an endless cycle of nature.

Helling is recognized as an important voice on the national- and international art scene and has been acquired by influential national- and international institutions and collectors.

Christian Tony Norum (b. 1980 in Oslo) has his education from The National Academy of Arts in Oslo. His works can seem like a play between different techniques, mainly painting, sculpture, performance, and installations. Norum combines art historical references with his own personal observations and creates characteristic and personal expressions in the different formats. His works are characterized by expressive and dynamic gestures and rich color combinations, reminiscent of modernist abstraction. By using abundant references Norum creates a forceful, free, and unbound imagery that expresses a contemporary zeitgeist.

He is in numerous private and public collections, amongst others The National Museum in Oslo and Storebrand Art Collection.

Gerd Tinglum (b.1951, Trøndelag) was educated as a visual artist at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung Hamburg (1969–72), Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (1975–77), Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts (1977–80) and Tokyo University of Fine Arts (1980–82). She was a professor of painting at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts from 1996 to 2009, and then at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design beginning in 2012, before becoming the principal there in 2014. Tinglum is regarded as a pioneer within the Norwegian conceptual art movement, and several of her works were included in the exhibition Stille revolt: Norsk prosess- og konseptkunst på 70- og 80-tallet at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016. Tinglum works with diverse mediums like painting, drawing, video, photography, sound, and textile, and pragmatically resolves what materials her ideas are realized through. She has a particular interest for pure colors, and has throughout the years developed a personal color alphabet, where each color has a particular denotation.

Tinglums works can be found in numerous private and public collections, amongst others The National Museum, Oslo , Trondheim Art Museum, Lillehammer Art Museum, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, KODE Art Museum, Fidelity Art Collection, Oslo City Councils Art Collection and Norwegian Culture Council.

Jorunn Hancke Øgstad (b.1979, Bærum) lives and works in Oslo. Her artistry explores and questions compositional elements and techniques within the abstract painting. In her works she utilize both traditional and untraditional materials to investigate their qualities. With references to art history and nods to epochs liks pop art, abstract expressionism and the 20th century spiritual abstraction, she mimics seemingly spontaneous processes and techniques as a conscious game with the eyes movement over the painting.

She studied at the University of the Arts in Oslo, and has lived and worked in Los Angeles, Berlin, Reykjavik, Bogota and New York. In 2018, she had a solo exhibition at the Munch Museum, as a collaborative project with Kunsthall Oslo and the Munch Museum. In the same year, several of her paintings were bought by the National Museum, and two years later by the Henie Onstad Art Centre.

Josefine Lyche (b. 1973, Bergen) is educated from the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts. Lyche explores the relationship between a kind of nonfigurative, post-conceptual painting to a cosmic, psychedelic New Age iconography, mixed with references to a classical painterly visual language with some added esoteric properties. The works display a combination of materiality and striking visuality that points to the belief in a beyond which promises eternal spiritual enlightenment. She primarily works within the field of abstraction, having made a significant mark within painting and sculpture.

Lyches work has been acquired by numerous private and public collections, amongst others Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, Oslo Municipality Art Collection, Caviar Factory Art Museum, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, KLP and Dnb-Nor.

Linda Lerseth (b. 1984, Trondheim) is educated at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art. Her work consists of sculptures, reliefs, tapestries and installations in a wide range of materials, spanning from concrete, epoxy and steel to ceramics and fabrics mixed with numerous other found objects that she molds and connects in a collage-like manner. In her work Lerseth experiments with chance and how one or multiple objects react to a material or a process, her working methods are both casual and completely focused. Lerseth’s work, with its very raw and strangely connected elements, can point to the ephemeral quality of what we surround us with. Her works can be sentimental for the viewer, looking at the deterioration or idolization of a lost objects from the past, being it a favourite snack or a pillow from Ikea. Lerseth’s work is visually both striking and uncanny, delivering a potpourri of meaning and new connections for the viewer to interpret.

Liv Tandrevold Eriksen (b. 1976, Oslo) is educated from the KHIO Institute of colour in Oslo.

Perhaps the greatest asset in Tandrevold Eriksen’s arsenal of resources is her exquisite lightness of touch. Her earlier paintings were delicate networks of thinly laid brushstrokes, evoking oily smudge patterns left on well used touchscreens. Since then, the quality of lightness has taken many forms in Eriksen’s images, in strangely atmospheric compositions where visual equilibrium is countered and attained by superimposition and layering. Some of her paintings introduces more physical elements to her layering process. The images are fairly large canvases occupied by amorphous blobs of diluted acrylics onto which fan-like constellations of similarly treated cutouts are attached to the support, either distributed as singularly applied patches or laid out in curvilinear sequences. These hybrid images notably depart from Eriksen’s previous works, inasmuch as the ground’s whiteness is less prominent and the sewn-on patches make for surfaces more textural and cluttered—however, curiously, without shedding the impression of lightness.

Where the graphic qualities of Eriksen’s earlier paintings tended to reveal her artistic background in drawing, the spaces conjured by her new images appear increasingly ambiguous. The multicoloured attachments look perfectly at home on the paintings’ surfaces, yet seem to hover weightlessly over the pictorial ground, like fluttering confetti. This effect of spatial oscillation—resulting from the appliquéd elements being, quite literally, cut from the same cloth as the rest of the composition whilst remaining materially distinct from it—is an eccentric take on the postmodern pictorial idiom which tilts the horizontal planes of illusionistic recession vertically.

Tandrevold Eriksen is in numerous private collections as well as Statens Kunstråd (SE), Norwegian Culture Council (NO), Fidelity Art Collection (US), Equinor Art Programme (NO), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NO) and KLP (NO).

Love Terins (b. 1993, Malmö, SE) studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Österlens School of Art and Design in Simrishamn.

In Terins' paintings, movement, repetition, and contrasts are explored. She is particularly concerned with the sensory experience that arises in the meeting between the work and the viewer, and the way that visuality of the painting has a bodily influence. The works alternate between figuration and abstraction, depth and flatness, and the paintings appear as a symbiosis of different patterns and color combinations. The various pictorial elements are often inspired by textiles and painterly expressions, giving the impression of optical illusions of space and movement. Terins sees her paintings as portals into a universe where patterns, shapes, and contrasts are transformed by each other. Tight and playful stripes are combined with large, undulating floral arrangements and other forms, opening a range of interpretation possibilities.

Terins is in the collection of the Fidelity Art Collection (US), the Central Bank of Norway and Art in the Workplace (NO).

Magnus Vatvedt (b. 1981) holds degrees from the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts (MA) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim (BA).

Vatvedt's artistic focus centers around incorporating readymades into his paintings, utilizing raw elements sourced directly from nature as primary components. He has garnered significant attention in recent years for his ongoing series of sand paintings, which he has diligently developed since 2012. Vatvedt's artworks delve into philosophical and existential inquiries while also exploring the tactile and visual attributes of sand within the realm of art. The sand-infused paintings present a captivating visual paradox, blurring the lines between abstraction and realism. In addition to his artistic endeavors, Vatvedt engages in curatorial work, notably spearheading the curation of Hotch-Potch-London in Hackney back in 2009, along with several exhibitions across Norway.

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.