Erik Asla is a Norwegian-born fine art photographer, based in Santa Monica, California. After moving to the U.S. from Paris, France, he became a protégé of celebrated image-maker Herb Ritts. Encounters with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg compelled Asla to resist the genres in which his mentor built an illustrious career. Asla was drawn to the solitary endeavor and unconstrained expressive boundaries presented by fine art photography.
Asla is currently engaged in his latest project ‘Elsewhere’. The aim is to use natural elements to elicit an emotional response, give form to light, while also satisfying an aesthetic principle. The images often possess a painterly dimension, with a materiality that enhances the expression.
Asla has been working on the project for four years. This has led to a peripatetic existence, an unrelenting search for natural environments and meaningful impressions.
Select Solo Exhibitions:
‘The Stillness of Motion’ - Janssen Art Space, Palm Springs, USA, 2017
‘The Stillness of Motion’ - Galleri Semmingsen, Oslo, Norway, 2018
‘Bevegelsens Stillhet’ - Drammens Museum, Drammen, Norway, 2021
‘Elsewhere’ - Galleri Semmingsen, Oslo, Norway, 2024
Select Public Acquisitions:
The U.S. Department of State, Washington D.C. , USA
Viking Cruises, Basel, Switzerland
Bank of Norway, Tønsberg, Norway
Labor and Welfare Department, Oslo, Norway
BI Norwegian Business School, Stavanger, Norway
Hevold Group, Oslo, Norway
Paramount Pictures Corporation, Los Angeles, USA
When the German philosopher and culture critic Walter Benjamin travelled by ship along the coast of northern Norway, he wrote about his impression of the midnight sun: It's like looking into the storage of eternal days in the warehouse of time.
It was a similar sentiment I felt when I saw Erik Asla’s photographs of sea and sky. It was like looking into the ocean’s warehouse of eternal horizons, I thought. There is something gloriously beautiful about these images. The boundary between the sea and the sky is both motionless and moving, at the same time.
Dag Solhjell, art historian, art sociologist, PhD
One of the first impressions that arises in encountering Asla’s photographs is their intimate kinship with the language of art we most often associate with some of the past century’s defining figures in painting and drawing. Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Vija Celmins—each working within traditional pictorial media—have all explored the division of the surface into bands, fields, and quiet expanses. Asla’s photographs extend this lineage, revealing how the photographic medium can converse with painting and drawing across boundaries. They convey a sense of elevated calm, a meditative stillness.
It is precisely this resonance across disciplines that situates Asla’s images naturally within a larger artistic tradition, affirming their presence as aesthetic objects of contemplative depth.
Øivind Storm Bjerke, art historian
No artist can recreate nature, only the experiences it can provide. The magical power in Erik Asla's photographs makes the spirit in the images hover between them and the audience – a passage to life in the viewer's chest. It is the magic of art, but also of nature.
Dag Solhjell, art historian, art sociologist, PhD
At first glance, the artworks could easily be mistaken for abstract paintings within the color-field tradition—a style I have always admired with its solemn, pathos-charged exploration of that elusive borderland between distilled landscapes and non-figurative spirituality.
But in fact, as Asla demonstrates, they are not paintings at all, but photographs. Remarkably, the saturated tones and the soft, almost painterly surface of many of these works seem scarcely imaginable as anything other than brushstrokes.
Kjetil Røed, art critic, Kunstavisen