A retrospective of the work of Norwegian painter Leonard Rickhard (1945-2024) spanning more than half a century.
Throughout a long artistic career, Leonard Rickhard cultivated a distinctive, easily recognizable style—a visual signature all its own. His retrospective exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museet in 2024 looked back at an art practice spanning over half a century, while showing how Rickhard tirelessly pursued his artistic project as a painter well into a sixth decade.
Since the mid-1970s, Rickhard returned to several subjects repeatedly in his paintings. The bird cabinet, the night painter, the model table, the birch forest, deserted barracks, and workers' sheds all appear in his paintings multiple times throughout his career. This book takes as its point of departure this iterative aspect of the artist's oeuvre, shedding light on how the artist kept revisiting these familiar scenes.
This publication is both a continuation of the exhibition presented at Astrup Fearnley Museet in 2024 and a significant new contribution to the evolving research on Leonard Rickhard's art. The book is richly illustrated with reproductions of his artworks, archival material, and photographs from the exhibition, and features newly commissioned essays that open up new perspectives on Rickhard's painterly universe.
