Bjarne Melgaard (born July 9, 1967) is a controversial contemporary Norwegian artist working in paintings, sculptures, and sensory installations. He was born to Norwegian parents in Sydney, Australia, but raised in Oslo, Norway. ^[1]

The Israeli-Russian billionaire Roman Abramovic purchased Melgaard art in May 2013, during a Bukowski auction in Stockholm, Sweden. Jose Mugrabi and Vito Schnabel purchased Melgaard art during the same auction. ^[20] Among other notable investors are François Pinault and Christen Sveaas. ^[4]

Melgaard attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland in 1990. In 1991 he attended the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He graduated from the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. After that he went on to study at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht from 1992 to 1993. ^{[2] [1]}

In 2015 police were called to Melgaard’s exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo where visitors complained about his video called Gym Queens Deserve to Die, which featured a model inserting a baby’s arm into his mouth in a sexualized manner. Melgaard was accused of pedophilia, but the Norwegian police found nothing criminal. ^[6]

In a performance piece called AIDS Roulette, he gathered together six gay men, one of whom was HIV positive, and then chose one man at random to have unprotected intercourse with. ^[5]

In 2014 there were accusations of racism and international outrage generated by his appropriated Allen Jones artwork “Chair” when an online magazine published a picture of Dasha Zhukova, a gallery owner and at the time Roman Abramovic’s girlfriend, sitting on a chair shaped like an almost naked woman tied up, offering her posterior as a seat and high boots as a backrest. ^{[7] [8]} Zhukova later apologized and released the following statement: “This photograph, which has been published completely out of context, is of an artwork intended specifically as a commentary on gender and racial politics. I utterly abhor racism and would like to apologise to anyone who has been offended by this image.” ^{[10] [13]}

Melgaard creates paintings, sculptures, and sensory installations.

He examines psychological angst, pedophilia, anxiety, pornography, sexual abuse and taboo-bending subcultures like the BDSM scene in New York City. The New York Times has described Melgaard as a "projectile vomiter" of an artist. ^[9] His works have become part of the permanent collections of major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm , amongst others. Melgaard’s art belongs to a long tradition of expressionism that can be traced back to Edvard Munch – Melgaard’s spiritual and stylistic mentor – and to the founding of Die Brücke in Dresden in 1905 (by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluf and Emil Nolde). ^{[2] [1]}

Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, "Face/OFF", Berlin

Maccarone, "The Social Failure", New York

2010