Born/raised: Trondheim, Norway / 1984

Education: Honours Degree, Fine Art (painting) / City & Guilds of London Art School, UK / 2008

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Mandal Fortes is predominantly concerned with painting as form and format. The situational (and material circumstances,) has a tendency to lay grounds for the artist's strategies in approaching the work, and he sees painting as an unfolding field of evocation and discovery. This opens up to a variety of different utilisations, dependent on the work's position.

The artist considers the act of painting, and the studio situation, as such, a panoptic vantage point in his work, in as much as the paintings themselves often function as artifice in a larger reading.

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Mandal Fortes sees the imaginative and fantastical as an invitation for his exploration into the other – the solemn to its frivolous counterpart – attempting foothold onto, and making sense of the oscillating pendulum between diametrically opposed polarities. As culturally and ethnically mixed himself, the amalgamation of the artist's interests, arising from his reluctance to singularly identify, lie in the unexplored, the undefined, the unresolved mercurial stream down the Yin Yang of painterly ontology; The Hintergedanken; The afterthought; The right fly in the right ointment.

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Andreas Mandal Fortes lives and works in Trondheim.