Lise Stigen

Lise Stigen was born in 1938, into a prominent family devoted to the arts, classical music, nature and philosophy - idealists who believed these things mattered in themselves. That upbringing shaped the work she went on to make, and it may be why people have always found something more than shape and colour in her paintings: an intention and a set of values behind the surface.

She took her formal art education at the academy in Aarhus, making her debut there in 1962. Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s she worked in a broadly abstract idiom, and an extended encounter with French art and culture shaped the direction her painting took in the years that followed.

Her work entered Norwegian public collections, among them the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo.

She married Anfinn Stigen, the philosopher, who had taught her at university; they had two children. Her brother is Arne Lie Christensen, the ethnologist and cultural historian.