FREDRIK VÆRSLEV AT THE NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM

In the winter of 2026, the Neubauer Collegium will host The Joy of Painting, the first institutional exhibition in the U.S. of Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev. 

The show features eight large-scale paintings, each representing a distinct body of work and conceived as an exercise in geometric abstraction. A micro-survey of sorts, The Joy of Painting includes four paintings newly made for the Neubauer Collegium gallery’s idiosyncratic architecture and four from the early 2010s that helped establish Værslev as a forceful new voice in the art world – one with a fresh critique of painting’s formal (and formalist) concerns. One giant painting reduces the Japanese flag to color and form, for instance; another calls to mind a speckled stretch of sunshade. Two bunched-up painted canvases resemble a parted curtain. And an example taken from the artist’s signature series, known as the “Terrazzo Paintings,” invokes the spirit of Jackson Pollock’s arch-modernist splatter art as much as that of the decorative Venetian stone floors they are named after.

Taken as a whole, the works on view showcase Værslev’s systematic interrogation of abstract art as well as the many methods through which abstraction can be produced. By exploring the social semantics of gestural and geometric abstraction, Værslev sheds new light on the classist overtones embedded in the ways a “taste” for abstraction is developed. These interests are a function of both the artist’s modest working-class upbringing and his initial exposure to the world of art through the proletarian prism of graffiti culture. The paintings are ironic visual puns that, tellingly, do not skimp on aesthetic delight.

Vaerslev’s practice is conceptual and cerebral, to be sure, producing a kind of imagery that invites reading as much as looking, deciphering and decoding as much as gaping and gazing. But his central concern with the mystique of handiwork reminds us of the primacy and physical delights of art production. Despite the spartan, occasionally forbidding rigor of Værslev’s formal language, The Joy of Painting is above all a heartfelt homage to the pleasures of making one’s mark, paintbrush and palette (or spray can) in hand.

The Joy of Painting is curated by Dieter Roelstraete. A catalogue about the exhibition, edited by Roelstraete, will be published by the Neubauer Collegium in 2026 and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.