Vebjørn Sand

Vebjørn's next project is to paint World War II with his homeland of Norway as the backdrop with estimated completion to be in 2020. The year 2020 commemorates the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Norway by the Nazis in 1940 as well as the 75th anniversary of the declaration of peace.

Due to the 2020 COVID-19 health crisis, The Rose Castle's formal opening has been pushed from its original date on April 9, 2020 to May 1, 2020, according to its website. It will be open until May 8, 2021.

On April 9, 2019, Sand, together with his brother Eimund, announced their joint project “Roseslottet 2020” (translated to “Rose Castle 2020”) an art installation to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the German occupation of Norway and the 75th anniversary of Norway's liberation during World War II. The art park will be built above the city of Oslo, surrounded by trees, and a few hundred meters from Frognerseteren. It is the same area that Sand erected the Troll Castle in 1997.

Vebjørn grew up in Hvaler, Norway with his 4 siblings. He has a twin brother, Aune Sand, who is a public figure in Norway. Though Vebjørn keeps out of the public eye, he has appeared numerous times on national television. Vebjørn and Aune have both been contestants on Skal Vi Danse, the Norwegian adaptation of the British dancing show Strictly Come Dancing with Vebjørn appearing in Season 8. Vebjørn has also participated in a cooking program, 4 Star Dinner and most recently in 2018 on NRK’s Kunsten å leve.

80 years after the original attack and 3 years after beginning the project, Vebjørn exhibited Guernica: A Turning Point in Oslo on April 26, 2017. It was Vebjørn's largest exhibition to date.

To bring the project full circle, a small pedestrian version of the bridge, named The Golden Horn Bridge, was inaugurated in June 2016 in Clos Lucé, France. The bridge was erected to continue and celebrate the legacy and genius of Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces and works that were realized in France. Clos Lucé was Leonardo's residence for his final years before he died in 1519.

While Scenes from the Second World War was already well received in the United States, bringing the exhibition to Norway was a personal victory for Vebjørn. Scenes opened March 2015 in Oslo, his largest exhibition in Norway in 8 years. A highlight of the successful exhibition came from Stig Andersen, a famous art critic who had been highly critical of Vebjørn in years past. Of Scenes Andersen said,

Since then, the Kepler Star has seen many uses including being lit pink for breast cancer awareness month in October 2014.

After Scenes, Vebjørn, still thoroughly captivated with the human stories and grand scale horror of World War II, began painting his next exhibition, Guernica: A Turning Point in early 2014.

When a new cultural minister was set to takeover in Norway in 2013, Vebjørn indicated that he hoped for a “fresh and lively debate’ on how the public art funds should be used and even hinted at a total clean up. A longstanding critic of the Norwegian cultural authority, Vebjørn said of the art scene:

In 2011, Vebjørn began painting his series Scenes from the Second World War, a collection of paintings focused on WWII. In Vebjørn's introduction to the project he points out that while there are many movies and books made of the war, there are little to no paintings or artwork. Inspired to examine the human side of the conflict, Vebjørn aimed to ask these questions with Scenes: “How could civilization collapse so completely? And: what does it mean to be a human being?”

Scenes from the Second World War opened in New York on November 10, 2011 to critical acclaim. Part Two opened on May 3, 2012 with several new large canvases being added. The exhibition received both praise from several art critics and high-profile sales, including 3 to American art collector Raymond J. Learsy and his wife Melva Bucksbaum for over a quarter of a million dollars or 2.1 million Norwegian Krone and 1 to an anonymous American newspaper publisher for upwards of 1 million kroner.

In 2009, Vebjørn built another ice bridge in Ilulissat, Greenland (where most icebergs are borne into the sea). Later that year in Copenhagen, as part of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP15, Vebjørn constructed yet another ice bridge in front of the Danish Parliament to raise global awareness of climate change.

In 2008, Vebjørn began work on a series of paintings that examined modern Western masculine ideals, those that “only address ego, greed, and ambition. It is an absence of visions beyond themselves.” he said.

Inspired by the work of American poet Robert Bly, he looked deeply into the lost initiation rituals that helped channel budding masculinity into adulthood, and our youth centered culture, what Bly called the “Sibling Society”. Becoming A Man debuted in May 2008 at Galleri Sand.

Building off the original Da Vinci bridge in Norway, Vebjørn used Leonardo's philosophy of encompassing all fields of research to use the project to discuss global warming. First he used ice to reinterpret and construct a new bridge during his expedition to Queen Maud Land in Antarctica. After that, in December 2007, Vebjørn erected a temporary ice bridge to dramatize the melting glaciers of Antarctica due to climate change outside of the United Nations Plaza in New York. During the unveiling at the U.N. Headquarters, Vebjørn said of the bridge in Antarctica,

Construction began the same year and was completed in 2001. This scaled down version of the da Vinci Bridge now serves as a pedestrian and bike crossing over highway E18, 20 kilometres (12 mi) from Oslo, by the nearby village of Ås.

Nearly 500 years after da Vinci’s original sketch, the bridge was officially opened by Queen Sonja in November 2001. Vebjørn, noticing that mostly men were opening public works at the time, specifically chose the Queen to open the bridge - a gesture she mentioned in her remarks. Of its completion Vebjørn said,

In order to explore the international art scene and to refine his technical skills Vebjørn left Norway for New York in 2000 and studied at the Art Students League of New York. Enjoying and finding freedom in the New York art scene, he rented a studio in Tribeca, in lower Manhattan where he rededicated himself to painting.

Vebjørn's next public arts project was the Kepler Star, a permanent 45 meter high art installation by the Oslo Airport. Created to honor Doctors Without Borders for winning the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, the star itself is based on a design from Johannes Kepler, further combined with an icosahedron - a polyhedron with 20 faces and one of the five platonic bodies, and consists of a skeleton made of steel with crinkled glass. The star sits on three thirty meter high concrete pillars; inspired by the Nunataken in Queen Maud Land Vebjørn saw during his expedition to Antarctica in 1996.

During the first 3 months of its opening in the winter of 1997/98, 180,000 people visited the Troll Castle.

In 1996, Vebjørn saw Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of a proposed bridge that would cross the Golden Horn “Haliç” in modern-day Turkey. Sketched in 1502 for Sultan Bayezid II, it would have been 366 m (1,201 ft) long, overall and 24 m (79 ft) wide. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible.

After an expedition to Antarctica, Queen Maud Land Vebjørn completed his first public work, The Troll Castle (Trollslottet) which was inspired by the voyage. In collaboration with the team who arranged the opening of the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer in 1994, Vebjørn constructed this “Mini Antarctica” formed by 10 towers surrounding a circle, all reminiscent of Arnesteinen, a mountain shooting out of the ice in the shape of a cathedral.

In 1991 while painting landscapes in Valdres, Vebjørn painted his work Okseryggen with oil paint, which gave him turpentine poisoning. Beset by visual disturbances and chronic headaches, Vebjørn gave up oil paint and began looking for another outlet for his creative expression. Given the poor quality of the alternative acrylic paint at the time, Vebjørn decided that outdoor projects and public art would be his chosen medium.

In 1991 while studying at the Norwegian National Academy, Vebjørn drew a national stir when he criticised his art professors for being unable to draw a hand and pushing a purely “modernist” curriculum and agenda.

When he was just 16 years old, Vebjørn toured Norway as a caricature artist, and over the course of three summers he painted approximately 3,000 people. It was only after he left high school in Fredrikstad in 1985, that he started to paint in the classic European tradition and to master his craft, young Vebjorn redrew hundreds of master drawings and copied hundreds of paintings from museums in Europe and the USA. Of this period in his life Vebjørn said,

Vebjørn studied under Walther Aas and Rolf Schønfeldt from 1983 to 1986, then enrolled in the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts where he spent 1986–88, and then had a one-year stay at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague before returning to the Academy in Oslo, where he left in 1990. He later studied at the Art Students League of New York.

Vebjørn Sand (born March 11, 1966, in Bærum) is a Norwegian painter and artist. He is known for his paintings as well as his public arts projects, such as the Da Vinci Project, and the Kepler Star monument (Norwegian Peace Star) at Oslo Airport, Gardermoen.

Vebjørn Sand was born March 11, 1966, in Bærum, Norway, and was raised on the coastal islands of Hvaler where his father Øivind Sand worked as a school teacher and painter at the Waldorf School. His mother Kari Marie Søyland taught at the same school. Thanks to his parents, he grew up surrounded by art, science, design and mathematics. The European Renaissance and the Baroque in particular were an early inspiration for Vebjørn due to the great advancements in art, science, and philosophy during that period.

Rather than depict bloody scenes and horrors, Vebjørn opted for singular moments in the war, such as A Scene from Wannsee, the secret Nazi conference in which the “Final Solution to the Jewish question” was decided January 1942, to the Nuremberg Trials to the myth of Josef Schulz, the German soldier who was supposedly shot by his comrades when he refused to execute prisoners in Yugoslavia. While the Holocaust was not the main focus of the paintings, Vebjørn's acute paintbrush brought the horror to life in both the composite scenes and individuals. Reflecting on the core message of Scenes, Vebjørn said:

The series focused on the Germans’ brutal attack on the Spanish city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937 that first introduced the concept of “Carpet Bombing”. While cities in Spain had been bombed by the Germans earlier in the war, Guernica was unique because it was both a military experiment conducted against a defenseless civilian population, and it left the city totally destroyed. Fewer than one percent of the buildings were left unscathed and while the official death toll was 1,654, many more were left forever buried under the ruins.