An Artist Signed Over His Career to Investors. Now He Wants It Back.

Bjarne Melgaard’s rise in the art world came with strings attached and an unusual contract with investors. Now he’s suing to regain control of his artwork.

The “Main Agreement” was supposed to be the final agreement, a contract to end all other contracts between two investors and Bjarne Melgaard, a provocative Norwegian artist who had drawn notice at the 2011 Venice Biennale with an exhibition about a fictional movement of gay terrorists.

Melgaard was struggling financially by the time he signed the agreement in 2020, capping a tumultuous rise in the art world. He filled Manhattan galleries with sex dolls and live tiger cubs. Wealthy collectors bought his work. Norwegian curators wrote that he was this generation’s answer to Edvard Munch.

But there was a darker side to Melgaard’s practice, and a lengthy addiction to crystal meth and other drugs that he said encouraged impulsive behavior.

He acquired mink coats he could not afford. His production studio in New York collapsed and a former employee accused him of withholding wages, which he said was caused by a delay from his investors. He fought over money in lawsuits with his mother and sister, and he criticized the Munch Museum after it canceled his solo exhibition during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Bjarne always pulled the rug out from underneath you, and he definitely pulled the rug out from underneath the art world,” said Michael Egan, a New York gallerist who exhibited Melgaard in 2012 and said he adored the artist despite his eccentric behavior. “If there was a moment for something to be extreme, he would find a way there.”