2022 - Bendik Kaltenborn

Bendik Kaltenborn at the Kittelsen Museum

Explore Bendik Kaltenborn’s vibrant, surrealistic universe at the Kittelsen Museum this summer.

Bendik Kaltenborn’s world is filled with humor, mystery, and madness. In it, we find bizarre and unlikely situations that are nevertheless recognizable and relatable. With artworks that are similar in spirit to Theodor Kittelsen’s folkloric paintings and drawings, Kaltenborn’s work is a celebration of visual storytelling’s subversive possibilities, across a range of artistic mediums

Award-winning cartoonist Bendik Kaltenborn will scare the hell out of you.

Audun Mortensen, Klassekampen, 2013

The exhibition at the Kittelsen Museum showcases a selection of his watercolours and riveting digital drawings as well as ceramics (a new addition to his artistic oeuvre). As in previous exhibitions and his acclaimed comic books, there is no real narrative to follow. Instead, the exhibition consists of cryptic vignettes that fit neatly within the parameters of a sheet of paper. Overheard conversations inspire his work; words and phrases can trigger an entire story.

A scruffy universe portrayed with a clean line. If it were music, it would be cool jazz.

Knut Nærum, Series that will do you good, 2009

Kaltenborn’s mountain cabin is where he finds the tranquility to produce his watercolors. These are much rawer—freer—than his illustrations. Because they’re not created to complement a specific article or speak to a specific audience – such as his work for The New Yorker and The New York Times in the U.S., for instance – they do not require research. In other words, there are no rules. Like Kaltenborn, Kittelsen reveled in the freedom of creating works from his own imagination. Although well-known for his illustrations of folk tales, toward the end of the nineteenth century, after a trip to northern Norway, his drawings and watercolors began reflecting an open landscape in which anything could happen.

Theodor Kittelsen has been a fundamental inspiration to me since I was a child and continues to do so, with his exceptional moods, encounters between the beautiful and the grotesque, the dark and the comical. I feel that he was truly ahead of his time and surprisingly modern in his expression, while at the same time preserving the old folk soul.

Bendik Kaltenborn

Bendik Kaltenborn (b.1980) is considered one of Norway’s foremost illustrators. He was educated at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo and the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. In 1997, he and his high-school classmate, Kristoffer Kjølberg, formed the comic collective Dongery, which eventually expanded to include Flu Hartberg, Sindre W. Goksøyr, Marius Molaug, and Anders Damonso.

He has participated in a number of exhibitions at home and abroad, and has had prestigious assignments for, among other things The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Diplomatic World. The list does not end there. He has also illustrated record covers for Todd Terje and book covers for Anne B. Ragde's books about Aesop's Fables, to name a few. He has also published books himself Six hungry men (2006), Serier som vil deg vel (2009), Likes the Style (2013) and Drawing, shape and colour (2017), which all garnered rave reviews. In 2020, Kaltenborn directed the short film Like the style, as part of the PhD project «Drawing, shape and color» by Oslo Academy of the Arts.

... his lush, detailed drawings, with their irresistible colour and dynamism, shine in every instance, created as they are to attract attention on urban walls as well as on printed pages. Kaltenborn is rightly an international success.

Kåre Bulie, Klassekampen