Ole Messel represents a younger generation of Norwegian painters who approach abstraction through a direct and physical relationship to the landscape. Born in Sarpsborg in 1986, he lives and works on the Danish island of Falster. Educated at the Art Academy in Bergen in 2013, Messel has developed a practice grounded in process and perception, where the act of painting becomes a conversation between the artist, the surface, and nature itself.
His recent exhibition For hånden at Van Etten in Oslo (2024) was his first solo presentation and brought together works created during and after a working residency at Per Kirkeby’s former studio Haabet on the island of Læsø in Denmark. During his two week stay, Messel worked in and around the studio, observing the surrounding terrain of trees, water, and built structures. Over the following nine months, the work continued in his studio at home, where he revisited and developed the canvases begun on Læsø, allowing them to remain open to new influences, shifts, and transformations. The elements observed on the island entered his paintings not through depiction but through gesture, rhythm, and colour. The result is a series of works that maintain a quiet dialogue with Kirkeby’s legacy of lyrical abstraction while remaining distinctly his own.
Messel’s paintings often unfold like shifting landscapes. In works such as Gjennom vår, Tilgro, and Strandenge, he explores transitions between warmth and cold, stillness and movement, structure and dissolution. Using egg tempera, acrylic, oil, and oil stick, he builds layered surfaces where tones and textures overlap. The paintings oscillate between opacity and transparency, between control and intuition, suggesting nature as something both seen and felt.
The process is central to Messel’s practice. Each work bears the marks of reworking and revision, where earlier layers remain visible beneath new ones. The surface becomes a record of touch and duration, inviting the viewer to move slowly and discover how form, light, and colour evolve across the canvas. His paintings do not present finished images but rather moments of transformation, where uncertainty and discovery coexist.
Although inspired by the natural world, Messel’s art is not about representation. It reflects an experience of landscape as something living and unstable, a place where growth and erosion occur simultaneously. His paintings ask for time and attention; they reveal their depth gradually, as new connections and rhythms appear within the surface.
Through this patient and tactile approach, Ole Messel’s work brings the landscape closer to the viewer, not as a picture of nature but as a living field of perception and change.