Born in Oslo in 1934, Frans Widerberg escaped with his parents to Sweden during the Nazi occupation of Norway. After a series of studies, including a four-month stint at Goldsmiths in London, he spent three years at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. There, he studied painting under Professor Alexander Schultz, but the moment of epiphany came to him when he received a state grant to travel to Italy. Disarmingly, he once remarked that until that point, he had thought himself “fantastic” as an artist, but after encountering the giants of the Renaissance, notably Masaccio, he felt humbled and reduced to tears.

Widerberg’s virtual world is inhabited by winged dogs, tigers, floating figures, centaurs, and human outcasts set in an existential wilderness illuminated by a light that sometimes recalls the Aurora Borealis and at others a post-nuclear incandescence. The dramas which take place in this ‘neverland’ are sometimes affectionate (between man and woman, for instance) but at others, redolent of the untrammelled violence of Nils Gaup’s extraordinary film Pathfinder, based on a Sami legend. These encounters are not founded upon the Sagas, Wagnerian or any other existing legends but are allegories created by Widerberg himself.

The pictorial means by which this ‘shadow’ world was created consists of a palette reduced to the three primaries of red, blue and yellow. Believing that light is created by colour, Widerberg typically established a blazing light, one which could set you alight, while irradiating a contingent space. “I provide myself with a pictorial universe where up is down and down is up: where far away is close and close is even closer – or farther away”, as he described it.

A mercurial character, Widerberg loved paradoxes and inversions. Other formal devices included striated bands of colour that ultimately derived from the terraced hillsides of Liguria while the horse and rider motif, doubtless originated from experiences in his childhood exile in Sweden and his fascination with horses.

The recipient of many awards and honours, in 1978 Widerberg was selected to represent Norway at the Venice Biennale. That honour significantly demonstrated his independence of spirit. Never an issue based propagandist he nonetheless, as a confirmed pacifist, caused a major controversy in Washington DC in 1970 with his ‘Letters to America’ group of paintings, critical of the conduct of the Vietnam War, which were only shown at the Smithsonian after much protest. Perhaps a more telling example of his independence, resides in his refusal to conform to the orthodoxies of abstraction during the 60s and 70s, in order to pursue a resonant and poetic figuration.