OSLO.- Shortly before the opening of his major solo exhibition, the Norwegian artist Leonard Rickhard passed away on January 7th, 2024, after a short illness, aged 78. With his passing, Norway lost one of its leading artists.

“The exhibition is my artistic goal,” Rickhard frequently said during the three-year preparation period for Between Construction and Collapse, which will open as planned on January 25th. He often made new paintings with an upcoming exhibition in mind, and Between Construction and Collapse is no different. Individual works were made using the planned display at Astrup Fearnley Museet as a guide. Only in the exhibition did the paintings achieve their full potential for Rickhard, and only after a long period of development at his studio in Arendal. Colors that resonate with several paintings in a room, the relationship between the architecture and the materiality of the paintings, the dimensions and the sculptural design of the frames – all of these factors find their final form primarily through the exhibition as an artistic medium itself. Through this exhibition, Astrup Fearnley Museet will celebrate and honor an artistic production spanning more than half a century, and at the same time show how Rickhard was undeterred in continuing his distinctive approach to painting.

“Leonard Rickhard was an artist who uncompromisingly stuck to his artistic project. He established a characteristic and easily recognizable idiom early on –a visual signature that is all its own in recent Norwegian art history. Rickhard’s paintings appear as a constant exploration – a desire to get to the bottom of something; they are about understanding the world through a mapping of observed reality. They have a universal, human core, with content that includes psychological, political, and sociological considerations. At the same time, the works are personal, and to some extent autobiographical. The motifs – which Rickhard painted many times, in constantly new versions – were often a form of processing memories and personal recollections from his own childhood shortly after the Second World War.” – Solveig Øvstebø, Director, Astrup Fearnley Museet

Between Construction and Collapse

January 26 - May 19, 2024

This retrospective exhibition – with more than 80 works – reviews an artistic practice spanning half a century, while showing how Rickhard has tirelessly pursued his project as a painter well into its sixth decade. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to experience the full breadth of Rickhard’s body of work, including several first renderings of familiar motifs such as interiors, studies of railway carriages and car wrecks, and evocative landscapes. Among the most recent works are two new versions of the model plane constructor, a motif Rickhard has returned to for over forty years, as well as a monumental, site-specific painting, which will be the most ambitious he’s ever created.

Leonard Rickhard (1945–2024) lived and worked in Arendal, Norway. He was educated at the National Academy of Applied Arts and the National Academy of Fine Arts (Oslo, Norway, 1966–1972). Earlier solo exhibitions include Lillehammer Kunstmuseum (1996), Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2020), ARoS (2016), Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall (2012), Festspillutstillingen, Bergen Kunsthall (2009), Sørlandet Kunstmuseum (2005), and Astrup Fearnley Museet (2001), among others.