Irma Salo Jæger & Muralverkstedet

LINOLJEFABRIKKEN / ATELIER LILLEBORG
Irma Salo Jæger and Muralverkstedet Atelier Lilleborg is housed in a former linseed-oil factory at Sagene in Oslo. The building was acquired in 2002 by the Irma Salo Jæger and Tycho Jæger Foundation, and transformed into studios and spaces for artistic study and production. Architect Sverre Fehn prepared an early architectural proposal, which was later developed and completed by Hille Strandskogen Architects in 2006.

The foundation was established by the artist Irma Salo Jæger and her husband, physicist and entrepreneur Tycho Jæger, in 1994 to support the visual arts and research in applied physics. The 1,150-square-metre building contains three artists’ studios: two are offered free of charge to invited professional visual artists for two-year periods, while the third is Salo Jæger’s own studio. It also houses practices within design and architecture and a study section with workshops, a library and meeting room/kitchen.

Irma Salo Jæger (born in Finland in 1928) has lived and worked in Oslo since the 1950s. She studied art history at the University of Helsinki before studying painting at the Norwegian National College of Art and Design and the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts.

A central figure in Norwegian art for more than six decades, Salo Jæger is known for her explorations of colour, light, movement and space. Her paintings combine expressive brushwork with structured fields of colour, while her experimental works from the 1960s expanded painting through poetry, kinetic sculpture, light and technology.

Her breakthrough exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in 1968 combined twenty-one paintings with a poem of twenty-one sentences. Three of the large paintings were conceived as drafts for a world flag. The series engaged with the period’s social upheavals and technological optimism. The exhibition was revisited at Kunstsilo in 2025-2026.

Salo Jæger has also been deeply engaged in art education and cultural policy. She was a professor at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts from 1986 to 1992. Together with Nils Eger, she developed Formteori: Geometri og farge. Grunnelementer i billedkomposisjon (1994), a lecture and compendium on geometry, colour and the basic elements of pictorial composition. Major presentations of her work include a retrospective at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in 2017 and an exhibition at KODE 4 in 2019. Foreningen Muralverkstedet was developed from a fresco workshop established at Atelier Lilleborg in 2013 on the initiative of Salo Jæger and the artist Astrid Nondal. It became an independent non-profit association in 2019.

Its study section includes a 112-square-metre workshop with a twelve-metre fresco wall and a smaller workshop. Courses for professional artists and art students have been held here since 2014, alongside independent projects and work with fresco, mosaic, encaustic painting and colour. The broader ambition is to create a place where material and visual knowledge can be examined, developed and passed on across generations as a vital part of contemporary artistic practice.