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In an old salt house on the Lofoten shore, Stig Bech's hand-coloured copper prints catch the mountains in the act of coming apart.
Stig Bech has an unusual quarrel with the present tense. For him "now" barely exists, only what came before and what follows, and his exhibition Mountains, destabilised at Salteriet in Nusfjord sets out to prove it on the Lofoten peaks themselves. His mountains, Skottind among them, are caught on a geological clock of rockfall, wind and water, grinding patiently towards sand, with the tiny figures and red rorbuer of the villagers clinging to the ledge where land meets sea. He wants us to admire the massif while it is still here, which, given the timescale, leaves ample room for a second look.
Bech is better known in Norway as a leading property lawyer and a public voice on mental health, and his printmaking has long been a way of steadying himself, a place of refuge between the abstract and the real. That tension runs through every sheet. Each print is drawn into copper, bitten in acid and pulled in small runs at the Nydalen studio he set up with artist Anja Solvik in 2022, then coloured by hand. A drypoint needle adds fine, nervous lines against broad, dramatic strokes, and the palette moves through black and slate grey, ice green and a deep arctic blue, with the odd flash of fishermen's red to warm the drama. Look out for The Lighthouse and The Departed House, titles that carry the show's preoccupation with permanence.
Bech long debated whether his pictures should be lovely or bleak, and in the end let them be both. André Breton held that beauty must be convulsive. Here it arrives in hand-coloured copper, gently signed.
The setting suits the work. For generations, Salteriet was where Nusfjord's fishermen salted and stored their roe, and today the old salt house is a two-floor gallery, run by gallerist Gerald Maximilian Bliem, with a programme that would hold its own in Oslo. Upstairs, in partnership with the Queen Sonja Print Award, Project: Lofoten pairs HM Queen Sonja with the Swedish artist Lars Lerin in prints of the same northern landscape, several carrying both signatures, alongside the Queen's lithographs Green Gaze and Blue Gaze. Through October, the village also hosts Fotografiska x Nusfjord, with solo shows by Rinko Kawauchi and Elizaveta Porodina. Smaller pleasures include Elisabeth Helvin's ceramic boxing angels and Renate Johansen's coloured drawings of the village buildings, made by one of the few people who live here all year.
Salteriet is part of the everyday fabric of Nusfjord Resort & Village, one of the best-preserved fishing villages on the island of Flakstadøya, brought back to life by Carl Erik Krefting and his daughter Caroline. The gallery nods to the family's passion for art, and it sits among 25 rorbuer cabins and two private-hire houses, including the former merchant's residence, The House of Dahl. Guests take supper at Restaurant Karoline or a pizza in the old whisky cellars of the Oriana Tavern, soak in wood-fired hot tubs on the seawater rocks, and drift into the gallery between a morning on the RIB and an evening by the quay. It gives Bech's prints an unusually attentive audience: people who have spent the day looking at the very mountains he has set down on paper. The gallery keeps the same hours as the Landhandel, the village's country store, and the gallerist can arrange guided tours.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.