One of Norway’s most important figurative painters of the latter part of the 20th Century, Frans Widerberg has been described as a seer, a healer, a shaman, a storyteller and a cosmologist. There is some truth in each of those descriptions, but a better comparison might be with Shakespeare’s Prospero, a magician presiding over an enchanted world. There are differences though. Whereas Prospero’s island was largely benign, Widerberg locates his dramatis personae in an existential wilderness illuminated by a light that sometimes recalls the Aurora Borealis and at others a post-nuclear incandescence.

Widerberg maintains that his “pictures are based on experiences, wishes and dreams. They are reality, just as wishes and dreams are.” That reality includes both timelessness and weightlessness: figures hover, levitate or swoop and dive.

The horse and rider is a recurrent motif, instantly summoning Goethe’s Erl King to us, while reminding us that Widerberg is the inheritor of Norse legends, as well as the heightened emotionalism of Edvard Munch. In contrast to the riders, who appear to dominate their territory, Widerberg’s other figures in a landscape seem isolated outcasts in an after-Eden world fraught with human fallibility.