Erik Asla is a Norwegian-born visual artist. After moving to Los Angeles from Paris, France, he became a protégé of celebrated image-maker Herb Ritts. Encounters with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein 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's first solo exhibition opened in Palm Springs in 2017, and his first major European show opened at the renowned Galleri Semmingsen (Oslo, Norway) in the fall of 2018. The prestigious Drammens Museum mounted Asla’s biggest solo exhibition to date in the fall of 2021. Twenty-one artworks were shown in the museum’s large exhibition spaces.

The U.S. State Department recently acquired a large artwork for its permanent collection, and Asla’s work is held in private and public collections all over the world.. Asla has also undertaken several residential commissions for private collectors.

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 storage of eternal horizons in the ocean’s warehouse. There is something gloriously beautiful about these images. The borderline between the sea and the sky is both motionless and moving, at the same time.

Dag Solhjell, art critic, author, dr philos