Two Series, One Practice

William Lidsheim is a Norwegian painter based in Oslo. His practice centres on large-scale oil paintings developed without predefined motifs, where form and meaning emerge through making rather than planning.

The work is currently divided into two parallel series that run under the same roof and share the same underlying principles. The first is intuitive: each painting begins with simple structural marks on the canvas and unfolds through repetition, adjustment, and continuous negotiation with the material. The Fermenting series belongs to this line of work.

The second is a displacement of the first. Here sketching is integrated into the process, not as a blueprint to be executed but as a way of developing further the formal language that emerged intuitively in the earlier work. The two series complement each other, and ideas and solutions circulate freely between them.

Working with a limited palette and a layered technique, Lidsheim often has several paintings in progress at once. Viewed as a whole, the practice functions as an ongoing series in which each painting contributes to a broader exploration of process and variation.