Ørnulf Bast was born in Kristiania/Oslo in 1907 and died there in 1974. Bast was a student of sculptors Torbjørn Alvsåker at the School of Arts and Crafts and Wilhelm Rasmussen at the Academy. Studies and travels in Europe, North Africa and the US had a significant impact on his artistic language and development up until his later years.

Ørnulf Bast became one of the leading and most esteemed Norwegian sculptors of his generation. He created monumental works, small sculptures, and reliefs. Bast also worked as a painter, graphic artist, draftsman, book artist, photographer, and writer. Sculptures by Bast can be found in cities throughout Norway, and he is represented in national galleries in Scandinavia and several other countries.

In large sculpture commissions, Bast drew on his classical training and inspiration from archaic art from Mediterranean countries. He had also early on developed his artistic language in line with modernist tendencies from study trips and contacts with Swedish and Danish art; expressionism, surrealism, abstractions, and constructivist solutions. This had an impact on his monumental and decorative tasks after the war.

Already in the 1940s, surrealism became part of Bast's expressive style in unique book publications and pastel paintings. He must be seen as a pioneer of non-figurative art with his entries in Norwegian and international competitions from the 1950s onwards; "The King's No" (Norway), "The Unknown Political Prisoner" (England), the railway workers' monument "The Breakthrough" and the Bjørnson monument "Longing Towards the Sea" (Norway), the Maritime Monument in Kiel (Germany). In a series of figureheads, he renewed this traditional decorative art. This culminated in the figurehead-inspired "The Norwegian Lady" (1962), here in Moss and in Virginia Beach, and "Metamorphosis of Nike from Samothrace" (1967) in Montreal.

In his final years, Bast worked tirelessly on new graphic techniques and experimented with various materials. He dismantled and reassembled his own sculptures with flowers and found objects into installations. His dreams and ideas demanded free form and opened up for new solutions, new travels. But then he was still stopped – by death one early morning in his studio in the autumn of 1974 – surrounded by his works and notes from the dreams of the past nights.

Ørnulf Bast's life's work places him in connection with both contemporary art expressions and the tradition he was an independent part of.