Terje Brofos, better known by his pseudonym Pushwagner (1940-2018), clearly left his mark on Norway and internationally. The artist has even been compared to Norway’s Edvard Munch after his death. The popular Norwegian painter had indeed dystopian visions of the future.
He was born during a bomb attack in May 1940, less than a month after the invasion by Nazi Germany. he was raised in Berg, a neighborhood in the North End of Oslo. In 1944, he was severely injured in a traffic accident. His father Fritjof was an engineer who struggled with alcohol. His mother Sonja worked as a biochemist.
Dystopian Visions of the Future by Popular Norwegian Painter, text follows below image.
Childhood and youth
As a child in Oslo, Pushwagner didn’t just suffer from claustrophobia, he said, but he was also quite paranoid – especially about his parents who said “phew” to anything he wanted to do – except drawing. Pushwagner’s first sketchbooks contain expressive scribbles of football players and Indians, motorcyclists and bloody boxing matches he made up in his own mind.
During his youth, he excelled in both summer and winter sports. He became one of Norway’s best tennis players and in 1955 played in a double’s final for the Norwegian championship with Arne Melander, a match which the duo lost.
Dystopian Visions of the Future by Popular Norwegian Painter, text follows below image.
Hailed as one of Norway’s most contemporary artists
Pushwagner has been hailed as one of Norway’s most important contemporary artists whose life was as tragic and colorful as the pictures he created. “He has been a living miracle,” Jan Christian Hermann Mollestad, a friend and work partner, told state broadcaster NRK. He noted that Pushwagner had come close to death several times during his years as a heroin addict and homeless person living on the streets.
Pushwagner finished his education at the State’s School of Art and Design of Oslo in 1959. He stated that he quit drawing for a period after his studies and that he struggled for several years to find his personal style.
Pushwagner met the Norwegian author Axel Jensen in 1968 and the two lived together for a time. Pushwagner illustrated Jensen’s book “Og resten står skrivd i stjernene” (And the Rest is Written in the Stars) (1995). Fascinated by comics since childhood, Pushwagner was inspired to start the series “Soft City” and “Doktor Fantastisk” during this period.
Related: A Norwegian’s Journey From Professional Snowboarder to Visual Artist
Dystopian Visions of the Future by Popular Norwegian Painter, text follows below image.
Commercial breakthrough in 2008
His commercial breakthrough didn’t come until 2008, after various periods of addiction and living on the streets. His art began to be bought up by museums after exhibitions in Berlin and Sydney and he also won the top prize at Norway’s annual fall art exhibit in Oslo.
Among his most famous works are “Soft City”, the satirical cartoon about a mechanical everyday life in a horror society of a big city, and “A day in the Mann family” with the same theme.
One of the last things he made before his death was a book cover in collaboration with the famous American cartoonist Chris Ware.
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Soft City
In an introduction to a new release of the book Soft City, Chris Ware writes that when he first encountered Soft City, he mentally catalogued it as “The Stanley Kubrick Comic Book.” The name fits the visuals. The book is cinematic, and Ware compares Soft City to a group of films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), and Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967). The skyscraper cities in these films are dense, impersonal, and often oppressive. Like them, the Soft City of Pushwagner’s imagination is a prescient vision of a future that we don’t want, but that may have already arrived.
“He’s been an outstanding character in Norwegian art history,” said NRK’s cultural commentator Agnes Moxnes, who noted how his art also attained “outstanding success” in recent years.
“It made him very happy to experience how enthusiastic folks were about his art, and that he became so dear to the public,” said Petter Mejlænder, who wrote a biography of Pushwagner. “He won support in the most unexpected corners. He made pictures that everyone saw something in.”
Dystopian Visions of the Future by Popular Norwegian Painter, written by Tor Kjolberg
Feature image (on top) Cadillac by Pushwagner