The “Main Agreement” was supposed to be the final agreement, a contract to end all other contracts between two investors and Bjarne Melgaard, a provocative Norwegian artist who had drawn notice at the 2011 Venice Biennale with an exhibition about a fictional movement of gay terrorists.
Melgaard was struggling financially by the time he signed the agreement in 2020, capping a tumultuous rise in the art world. He filled Manhattan galleries with sex dolls and live tiger cubs. Wealthy collectors bought his work. Norwegian curators wrote that he was this generation’s answer to Edvard Munch.
But there was a darker side to Melgaard’s practice, and a lengthy addiction to crystal meth and other drugs that he said encouraged impulsive behavior.
He acquired mink coats he could not afford. His production studio in New York collapsed and a former employee accused him of withholding wages, which he said was caused by a delay from his investors. He fought over money in lawsuits with his mother and sister, and he criticized the Munch Museum after it canceled his solo exhibition during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Bjarne always pulled the rug out from underneath you, and he definitely pulled the rug out from underneath the art world,” said Michael Egan, a New York gallerist who exhibited Melgaard in 2012 and said he adored the artist despite his eccentric behavior. “If there was a moment for something to be extreme, he would find a way there.”
As Melgaard’s bills grew during his rise to fame, he relied increasingly on the financial support of Svein Roar Grande and Stein Lie, who had little background in the art market. They paid him nearly $10 million from 2008 to 2020 in exchange for artwork, both sides said, a relationship that lasted through more than a dozen agreements despite the artist’s continual money trouble.
In 2020, Melgaard signed the Main Agreement, which outlined financial terms between the two parties going forward. But in an attempt to void the contract, Melgaard filed a lawsuit last year arguing that Grande and Lie had verbally pressured him with misleading details about his debts. Lie countersued, saying that Melgaard had breached the Main Agreement.
Now the future of the artist’s career could be in the hands of a Norwegian court, which will begin hearing the case on Tuesday.
The Main Agreement was supposed to be a lifesaver, absolving Melgaard of nearly $16 million that Grande and Lie said he owed them, according to Melgaard’s lawsuit, in addition to nearly $500,000 for unpaid studio rent, American taxes and a book project. (A lawyer for the investors said they did not name a specific amount.)
But Melgaard said in an interview with The New York Times that he felt pressure to sign the contract and did so while drunk, only realizing later what he had signed away: ownership of hundreds of paintings and thousands of prints; the rights to produce a series of sculptures; and the ability to oppose sales of his own work. The value of the forfeited art trove has been estimated at millions of dollars, according to emails from Tim Smith, his studio manager at the time, that are included in Melgaard’s lawsuit.
“My biggest mistake is the same one that most artists make,” Melgaard, 57, said during a video interview from his studio in Oslo. “You would do just about anything for your art.”
In aviator sunglasses and a bleached buzz cut, he appeared restless, clutching the lapel of his denim jacket, which obscured the words printed on his shirt: “I ruined my own life.”
Modern-Day Patronage
Although many artists subsidize their practices with financial support from galleries, the relationship between Melgaard and his investors recalls a largely defunct practice of patronage whose heyday was in the Italian Renaissance. That was when influential families like the Medici clan financed Florence’s most famous artists, including Botticelli and Michelangelo.
Grande and Lie aspired to that kind of relationship with Melgaard, who was connected to them when he moved from Barcelona to Oslo in 2008; Grande ran a transport company and Lie had earned a small fortune selling bed duvets. The friends struck a series of deals with Melgaard to finance his operations. According to his lawsuit, that initially included $20,000 a month to rent a large art studio in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick.
Despite the money provided by his backers, Melgaard continued to overspend, leaving him with large debts that he believed would be covered by his investors. The Main Agreement was supposed to clear the air.
But Melgaard said that signing the contract, which also authorized a proxy to sign prints with his name, was a mistake.
“If you see the contract that I signed, you would realize that no person with a clear mind would sign it,” Melgaard said.
Melgaard also said in his lawsuit that the investors had watered down his market by selling copies of his artworks in nearly 40 galleries across Norway, creating such a high supply that prices have dropped. Some galleries sold editions of his sculptures in variations he never approved, he said, including a version of “Don’t Wanna See,” a depiction of a rat sitting on a concrete box, with a price of more than $42,000.
Lie and Grande did not respond to those assertions about his artwork, but in a written statement to The Times, they said the evidence would dispel Melgaard’s claims.
“Bjarne Melgaard is a fantastic artist but with limited abilities to convey facts,” they wrote. “These are agreements that Bjarne himself has initiated, but which he is now trying to escape in order to evade a significant debt burden from the U.S.A. and Norway after two decades of reckless and uncontrolled spending.”
The investors have also said, in a legal filing, that Melgaard owed his international reputation to their money. His art practice “of such quality and at such a pace would not have been possible without Grande and Lie’s funding,” their lawyer argued in a legal filing.
For some time in the 2010s, Melgaard was a contemporary art star. His auction market peaked in 2013, when an installation called “Kill Me Before I Do It Myself” sold for about $471,000, according to an Artnet database. The artist complemented his six-figure sales with controversy and clout.
“He was a chaos machine,” said Egan, the owner of the Ramiken Crucible gallery, whose 2012 Melgaard show featured two tiger cubs shredding clothes from the fashion brand Supreme. The cage housing the tigers was not fixed into the floor and would rattle as the animals circled.
A year later, in 2013, the dealer Gavin Brown exhibited Melgaard’s large sculpture of the Pink Panther smoking crystal meth alongside an assemblage of pornographic images, psychedelic patterns and expressionistic paintings. The show earned roundabout praise in The Times from the critic Ken Johnson, who wrote: “Bjarne Melgaard is a projectile vomiter, and like Linda Blair in ‘The Exorcist,’ he seems possessed by a demonic force.”
Melgaard said he enjoyed pushing boundaries, sometimes to his own detriment. “I have been canceled a hundred times,” he said. “I was a functional drug addict.” Several of his works have included hypersexualized images of Black people, including a chair whose main structure is a scantily clad Black female mannequin on her back.
“What happened to Bjarne Melgaard?” said Brown, who has exhibited the artist at least three times. “He pushed things as far as he could.”
An Uphill Battle
Melgaard said he turned a corner last year by getting sober and getting married; his husband works as his adviser and assistant. Now Melgaard wants to fix his professional life by ending the Main Agreement.
Some legal experts, however, say that it is difficult to exit a signed contract, even if it were signed when one of the parties was drunk.
Hilde Hauge, a law professor at the University of Bergen in Norway who is unaffiliated with the suits, said Norway’s laws allowed contracts to be voided if a judge determined that the terms were unreasonable or dishonest.
One artist, she said, successfully sued a patron who took ownership of his entire collection of artworks in exchange for previous financial support. But that kind of decision is rare.
“It is important to note that the threshold for setting aside a contract due to unreasonableness is generally high,” Hauge said.
Smith, Melgaard’s former studio manager, said that the decade he worked with the artist was one of the most rewarding and challenging times of his career. Smith, a potential witness in the Norwegian court case, is now employed by Grande and Lie for bookkeeping.
“Things went sour when his investors turned off the spigot,” Smith said. “At some point, Bjarne’s behavior became problematic. He lost key relationships with dealers, backers and institutions.”
Over the past year, Melgaard — who previously took steroids and wore black leather jackets to look like the buxom men in Tom of Finland illustrations — has focused on rebuilding his career by dabbling in the fashion industry.
He plans to introduce a new perfume during Art Basel Paris this month, teaming with the city’s Dover Street Parfums Market. And he is still creating art, albeit on a smaller scale, in the form of digital illustrations of rats on skateboards.
“My outlook is that this current lawsuit could be settled,” Melgaard said with a shrug, raising a hand with the word “PAPPA” tattooed across it. He added, “I wish that I could move on.”
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