NICO WIDERBERG is a sculptor, painter and printmaker who has exhibited internationally and comes from one of Norway’s most creative families. His father, Frans, has long been acknowledged as the foremost figurative painter since Edvard Munch.
Defiantly independent, Nicolaus Widerberg is also relentlessly inventive. Having reinvigorated neo-classicism by producing sculpture which exists in a continuum accommodating Middle Kingdom Egyptian, Hellenistic and archaic art his work remains unmistakably of today.
After graduating from the Academy in Oslo, he continued his studies in France and in 1984 travelled to Italy where he worked alongside the jobbing masons of the Carrara quarries, quickly learning to identify cut stone by its smell. While in Italy he also developed an interest in the work of Marino Marini and Mimmo Paladino, important additions to his personal pantheon of artists including Moore, Rodin, Ipousteguy, Picasso and Giacometti.
Widerberg’s predominantly still and monolithic pillar figures clearly have a kinship with Giacometti’s elongated presences, but Paladino, with his insouciant reintroduction to sculpture of narrative, myth and surrealist invention, has arguably had the greater influence.
The art critic William Varley once described Widerberg’s sculptural figures as “beings in a state of suspended animation, hence their timelessness. As in fairy tales, if you kissed them, they would wake, breathe, move and talk.”
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