Even CEOs get summer jobs. Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund—the public fortune created by the country’s vast oil deposits—has been nicknamed Norway’s “Trillion Dollar Man.” Yet this summer he has been a tour guide in his hometown of Kristiansand on Norway’s southern coast.
Tangen has been showing people around Kunstsilo, the £50 million (about $67.8 million) project that turned a monumental Brutalist grain silo on the town’s dock into a showcase for his collection of Nordic modern art. He gifted the whole package to his town in the summer of 2024. Although the part-private, part-public funding model for its running costs was hugely controversial, the institution has become a phenomenon: Time magazine hailed it as one of the “World’s Greatest Places.”
Behind the unlikely summer gig is one of the more consequential collecting projects in recent Nordic art history. Over two decades, Tangen has assembled thousands of works with the explicit aim of challenging established national canons, championing artists who have fallen from fashion, and filling gaps in the historical record. Now, with the collection installed in a major public museum, his private taste has acquired unusual institutional—and market—power.
Tangen’s collection ranges from works by internationally renowned figures from the region, such as the late Danish CoBrA artist Asger Jorn, through to lesser-known characters, including the Swedish figurative painter Ola Billgren, whose works offer a hazy blend of Hitchcock and Hockney. Highlights can be enjoyed in the current exhibition “Pictures from a New World: Stories from the Tangen Collection.”
On his summer break from his state job, Tangen—an improbably energetic 60-year-old—has been guiding public groups through the galleries in a canary-yellow Kunstsilo-branded gilet, a microphone clipped to its lapel. His delivery is folksy and engaging. “You see where you keep people’s attention, when you get it completely silent, and when they want to move on,” he noted, talking to Artsy following one of the tours. He had them laughing, especially when introducing the more outré pictures. Any jokes fall flat? “Sure,” he acknowledged. “I wasn’t very saucy this time.”
The word collector can mean “so many things,” observed Tangen. “I think it starts by defining your area of interest, and what it is that speaks to you as a person. So first you have to define and frame, and then the work starts.” He is not interested in acquiring works by “the flavor of the year…I know exactly who they are, these artists who everyone else is buying. We’re not buying any of it. We’re doing the opposite: we’re buying stuff that is out of favor. And, frankly, we define art history. This is a scholastic collection.”
Tangen’s use of “we” is deliberate. Throughout his collecting adventure, he has worked with specialists in each of the Nordic countries. “I really don’t like ‘I,’” he said. “It would be very dishonest to pretend I’ve done all this by myself. One person cannot build this; it’s too comprehensive,” he explained. “You’d have to fly around like a madman.”
His key advisor has been the art historian Steinar Gjessing, who also helped form the collection of the late Norwegian business tycoon Stein Erik Hagen (from which Tangen has acquired some 400 works). The motivation behind the Tangen Collection has always been “to find gaps in and alternatives to the national canon,” noted Gjessing. “To demonstrate that there are many stories. Many layers. Many voices.”
Tangen grew up in Kristiansand in the 1970s; his early interest in art came from his art historian mother. Later, he built the successful AKO Capital hedge fund in London, before taking the helm at the Norwegian oil fund in 2020. His artistic interests remained throughout: in 2003, he took a two-year sabbatical to study for an MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
The first artist to catch Tangen’s eye was Johannes Rian, the mid-century Norwegian painter, whose colorful figurative works echoed those of his teacher Axel Revold and, in turn, Revold’s teacher Henri Matisse. And then came the German-born Norwegian artist Rolf Nesch, on whom Tangen wrote his Courtauld thesis. “He came in quite early in my thinking. It’s partly the composition of the work; it’s the colours; it’s the technique. The whole thing that makes it powerful on the wall. I didn’t know about him.”
He began with Norwegian works before panning out to Swedish, Danish, and, finally, Finnish art. There was a financial advantage to his strategy. “When I started, art from the 1950s wasn’t very sought after, so you could just scoop up the most incredible things.” Tangen’s activities have single-handedly driven prices up for the artists featured in the collection. “Now it’s hyper fashionable.”
Tangen’s tastes have changed—finessed—over the years. “In the beginning it was a bit decorative and simple, and then it became complicated pretty quickly. My heart is closest to abstract art. I think abstraction is modernism and the way you disentangle color and form.” His collection is particularly strong in works that fragment landscapes and interiors: Anna-Eva Bergman’s monumental rock forms, Tove Jansson’s café interiors.
Tangen’s other great interest is literature. He recently interviewed Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, on his In Good Company podcast (a platform for business leaders and contemporary thinkers). Cain told Tangen that his 10-year-old self would reflect his true character. “I think that is so interesting because I was an introvert, just read books all the time. And I think I have gone back to that,” he said.
Next year Kunstsilo and U.K. literature festival Hay will collaborate on a new literature festival in Kristiansand. The event will have an international focus, Tangen noted, adding that contemporary Norwegian fiction has got stuck in a rut of “gloomy nothingness.” Although the Tangen collection is not without its fair share of melancholy pictures. “We have a lot of it,” he said. “That could fill another exhibition. You could call it: ‘Sad as Hell.’”
Collecting has taken him out of boardrooms and—tentatively—into studios. “I’ve never been very close to the artists whose work I collect. I think proximity can easily bias you,” he said. “Business people tend to be more uniform and alike, in my experience. Artists often carry different struggles, and their art becomes a way of expressing and working through them. I enjoy spending time with both business people and artists. I think it lets me use two different sides of myself.”
Today, Tangen only buys works for Kunstsilo. What he hangs at home are the “leftovers” from earlier collecting days. “I haven’t bought anything privately since 2015,” he said. “Happiness is in the mind; happiness is not about a painting or something you have on the wall. I never miss anything. I like change. When we’re done here next week, I’m not going to miss the summer; autumn is coming up.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/9Odkr2G
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