The artistic practice of the Danish/Norwegian artist Nils Erik Gjerdevik (1962–2016) encompassed painting, works on paper, and ceramic sculptures, as well as site-specific installations, including wall paintings and sculptural installations.

Gjerdevik was well known for his non-figurative paintings, which challenged established rules and conventions of painting as a genre. He questioned our ideas of how a painting should be presented through his use of unusual formats, alternative colors, and compositions rarely built around classical notions of harmony. His paintings often achieve a double-edged expression, where seemingly divergent ideas and movements converge into a single image. This approach extends to his drawings and ceramic sculptures as well. The sculptures and paintings function as different yet closely related points of entry into Gjerdevik’s artistic thought, almost always coming together as a unified expression when exhibited.

His focus and field of interest centered on what could be called the preconditions and potential of the non-figurative. His works often resemble surveys of diverse systems of abstraction in art history: the linear structures of Constructivism, the meandering arabesques of Art Nouveau, the grid systems of Minimalism, the visual phenomena of Op Art, and patterns and styles of Pop Art. In his works, Gjerdevik broke with classical principles of composition; distinctions between foreground and background are blurred, and perspective appears to point both into and out of the painting. He flirted with a psychedelic architectural universe, where gravity was suspended and impossible encounters between subjects, themes, styles, and techniques occur. Gjerdevik consistently incorporated the architectonic as a principle in his work, whether in three-dimensional sculpture or two-dimensional painting.