In this special edition of selected works for the month of September, we celebrate the accessibility and inclusivity of the art world by shining a spotlight on limited edition prints. These are carefully curated, hand signed, and numbered allowing art lovers a chance to bring the beauty and narrative of original works into their homes at a more accessible price point. Although prints differ from original canvases, they cary the same artistic value, passion and intent, making them a perfect choice for all collectors.

The artists in this curatorial article are well regarded within the art world. Through a variety of printing methods (screen printing, digital printing, & lithographies), we invite everyone to own a piece of creativity. You are more than welcome to come and experience the expressiveness of the prints in person— through texture, pigments and depth.

Håkon Bleken's prints mirror the central themes of his artistic career. His works frequently play with both abstract and figurative expressions, and has as of lately incorporated collage elements. He's also described as a literary painter, who tells stories and conveys messages through his works. These narratives are often centered around myths, landscapes, and human influence on nature, which is apparent in the prints Bleken presents through QB Gallery.

Håkon Bleken (b. 1929) has his education from the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts (1949-1953). He is one of Norway’s most prominent contemporary artists, being exhibited in major galleries and museums, and with extensive public art commissions.

Bleken has greatly influenced the Norwegian and European contemporary art scene, and recently had an extensive exhibition shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Coruña (2016), as well as solo exhibitions at institutions like The Museum of Contemporary Art and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. In 1999 he was appointed a Knight 1^st class, and in 2009 a Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav.

Håkon Bleken’s works are acquired by The Norwegian National Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Bergen Billedgalleri, Lillehammer Art Musuem, The City of Oslo Art Collection, and the Trondheim Art Museum, amongst others. When Bleken in 2005 was awarded the Anders Jahre’s Culture Award, he chose Sverre Bjertnes for Anders Jahre’s Award for Young Artists. The two artist’s mutual respect and admiration for each other’s works resulted in the duo exhibition AVTRYKK at QB Gallery in 2015.

Marianne Heske was groundbreaking when she in the early 1980s portrayed the Norwegian landscape with a video camera that she extracted stills from. She would then digitally modify the images, creating pixellated dream-like simulacrums and then print them in large formats.

Growing up in the north west of Norway, surrounded by titanic mountains over the Norwegian fjords, Heske brought with her a grand respect for nature and its powers. Following the traditions of romantic landscape paintings, Heske's video paintings praise the grandiosity of nature.

The word mind in the works' titles is pointing at Heske's wish for creating a philosophic and intellectual encounter with nature. The series contributed to changing society at the time's expectations of how different mediums could be utilized in art, and contributed to Heske's position as a ground breaking artist within the scene of Norwegian and international conceptual art.

Marianne Heske (b. 1946) is educated at Bergen Kunsthåndverkskole, Ecole Nationale Supèrieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, Royal College of Art in London and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Heske has been active as an artist for more than 40 years, and has exhibited in museums all over the world. She has been purchased by all the major museums in Norway and a number of foreign ones, including the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.

In 1980, Heske created a historic work with "Prosjekt Gjerdeløa" when, as her artistic project for the XI Biennale de Paris, she moved a 350-year-old lair from Tafjord in Sunnmøre to the Center Pompidou in Paris. The Løa was then moved from Paris to Norway again and exhibited at the Henie Onstad Art Centre, before being transported back to Tafjord and set up again in its place of origin exactly one year after its dismantling. Project Gjerdeløa has remained a historical key work in Norwegian art history in general and the history of Norwegian conceptual art in particular. Later, she moved an old wooden house that was passed outside the Stortinget. The project entitled "House of Commons" was done as a contrasting effect to the exalted national assembly and a reminder of the living conditions of ordinary people in Norway just 100 years ago. In Torshovdalen in Oslo, there is a 10-tonne bronze sculpture of a doll's head based on a figure Heske found in 1971 in papier-mâché, at a market in Paris.

The artworks are based on earlier paintings and have been printed by the artist himself at the Fellesverkstedet print shop in Oslo. The technique is screen printing in stochastic rasters, a technique with small dots in several layers of colours that is usually known and used in newspaper printing.

Bjørn Båsen (b. 1981, Eggedal, Norway) has a BA from The Arts Institute at Bournemouth and an MA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Båsen’s works invite the spectator into a whole new world. His skillful perspectives make one feel as though you could take a leap and fall into his illusion of a blissful wonderland. However, in his world of porcelain puzzles, cracks are always present and propped with references to deep and often dark matters. Båsen’s oeuvre is filled with references to mythology, past and present decadence – the fairytales of former glory meet the realism of today.

His work is included in the collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museum, KODE Art Museum, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, The Grieg Art Collection, Equinor Art Programme, Stavanger Kommune Art Collection, DNB as well as numerous private collections nationally and abroad.

Lars Morell (b. 1980, Norway) 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 Malmö Art Museum, Sørlandet Art Museum, Equinor Art Programme, KLP and the Hoff Collection.

Christer Glein (b. 1984, Trondheim) has his degree form Falmouth College of Art (2006). He is exploring the anatomy of art through using different artistic techniques, and uses the painting’s ability to narrate to depict the balance between the narrative and the formal; the abstract and the figurative. Glein is especially known for his big-scale oil paintings, where modernistic abstraction meets figurative historicism.