Henning Sørgaard

Henning Sørgaard (b. 1948, Oslo) is among the most quietly enduring figures in Norwegian post-war painting. Trained in Oslo and Bergen in the late 1960s, he settled early on a narrow grey register and has held to it for more than five decades. His paintings begin as recognisable images — a window, a doorway, a wall, a figure, fog over water — laid down in thin successive veils of oil, then scraped and pulled back across the surface with a squeegee or blade until the subject is half-erased and held just short of legibility. Worked almost entirely between lead-white and soot-black, with only the rare admission of a single cold undertone, the surfaces register as much absence as image. Often grouped with the broader Richter-grey lineage, Sørgaard's work is slower and more northern in temperament: less about photography than about weather, light and the act of forgetting. He has exhibited steadily since the early 1980s across Scandinavia and continental Europe, with museum solo presentations in Oslo and abroad. The gallery's senior anchor, he has lived and worked in Oslo throughout, keeping a deliberately half-private profile. He continues to paint daily.

I put the image down and then I take most of it away. What remains is usually closer to what I saw than the thing I started with. Grey is not an absence of colour to me; it is the colour of remembering. The painting is finished when there is nothing left to remove.