Bjørn Carlsen attracted attention as an outstanding painter already at his first public exhibition, winning glowing reviews from the entire corps of critics and warm praise from his colleagues. With regard to both his painterly execution and the mastery of motifs, his works emerged as an independent commentary to the new figuration that had developed in Norwegian and international painting circles since the middle of the 1960's, which did not demonstrate the Pop-art preference for everyday, mass-produced objects, and which used a broad selection of references from art history as a central frame of reference rather than decorative and media-created elements.
As a part of the modern cultural frame of reference, we must note Carlsen´s use of Donald Duck and Daisy Duck as recurrent figures in his pictures. They are often portrayed with a touch of the grotesque - but no more grotesque than the modern man or woman on the street can appear in certain circumstances. In Carlsen´s pictorial world the Duck figure is a symbol of cultural and spiritual vulgarisation.
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