Inge Jensen

Inge Jensen mixes marble dust or MDF dust with oil-based paint to build up sculptural fields on the canvas. He uses the painting technique pastos where he has ironed voluminous layers of oil-based paint on the painting's surface that create a 3D effect. The reliefs are built up with many colors, so that a blue painting from a distance, at close range, turns out to consist of countless small patches of color in many colors. Due to the uneven surface, the light is reflected in a special way, creating dramatic light/shadow effects. The pastos technique causes paint to stand out many centimeters from the canvas. The use of stone dust makes Jensen's works relatively heavy to lift.

Jensen's works have clear references to nature's basic elements and experiences of nature. The surface forms a soundboard that contrasts with the often organic, autonomous life of the processed surface. He achieves this by creating a tension in painting that opens up new angles, new ways of experiencing art. Inge Jensen are an accomplished colourist. The first, spontaneous encounter with his works is often characterized by the feeling of experiencing something beautiful or seductive. But the beautiful and seductive does not exist without its contradictions, and it is the work of exploring and processing the contrasts between these contradictions that characterizes Inge Jensen's oeuvre.

Inge Jensen was inspired by neo-expressionism in the 1980s and painters such as Per Kirkeby and Anselm Kiefer. Each artist then sought to convey his or her own subjective interpretation, or experience of existence and itself in this. Towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Inge Jensen developed a more abstract idiom expressed through a clear materiality, a material painting with clear references to nature and nature's basic elements.

It is rare to see the development of an artist as clearly as when you look at Inge Jensen's production from the last 20 years. One gets the impression that he is in a continuous dialectical (to get into a problem) process where existential issues, metaphysical search, and experiences of nature on the one hand, formal and aesthetic issues on the other drive the works forward in a slow, almost organic development. The same process can also be sensed in the individual works of art that give the impression, almost by virtue of themselves, their own inner life, of having forced their way forward.

Jensen has had very many exhibitions at museums and galleries in Norway and abroad. He is purchased by private and public collections.