Astrid Nyland

Astrid Nyland trained as a lighting technician before she studied art in Oslo. She paints the weather in flat, bright shapes on canvases four metres wide, and sometimes straight onto the gallery wall.

Her paintings look like a child drew them, and that is the point. A sun is a circle, a cloud is a few bumps and a line, rain is a row of drops. Up close you can see how much work it takes: every edge cut by hand, every colour mixed again and again until it reads from across a room.

She paints on the floor of her studio, which she empties for every big canvas, and works in the order the weather comes: sun first, cloud second, rain last.

She has worked with the museum since 2016, when Rain Study No. 4 became the first work by a Norwegian artist to enter the collection. Everything Is Weather, ten years later, is her largest painting so far.