Magne Furuholmen

Biography

The first thing Furuholmen worked at in earnest was not a picture but a tune: he came up with the riff for “Take On Me” at fifteen, when the song still had a different name.

He was born on 1 November 1962 in Manglerud, a district of Oslo. His father, Kåre Furuholmen, played trumpet in the jazz orchestra Bent Sølves; on 1 May 1969 he was killed in a plane crash over Drammen together with the whole band. The boy was six. His mother worked as a teacher and later remarried, and three more children were born in the new family. At ten Magne made friends with a neighbour, Paul Waaktaar-Savoy. By seventh grade he had become absorbed in music, listening to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, while at upper secondary school he was an average student with little interest.

In 1978 he and Paul founded the band Bridges. In 1980 it released its only album, “Fakkeltog” (“Torchlight Procession”), self-financed, with songs in English. The friends then left for London and, according to some accounts, spent about eight months there, ran through their savings and went home.

In 1982, according to other accounts early 1983, the singer Morten Harket joined them, and a-ha came into being. Furuholmen plays mostly keyboards in it, sometimes guitar, and with Waaktaar-Savoy wrote most of the band’s best-known songs: “Stay on These Roads”, “Manhattan Skyline”, “Cry Wolf”, “Foot of the Mountain” and others. Later he also wrote on his own: he is the author of most of the songs on the albums “Lifelines” and “Analogue”, and he sings lead on “The Summers of Our Youth”. When the band took a break in 1994, he turned to other projects; in 1998 a-ha reunited, in 2010 it announced a farewell tour, but later it came back.

Visual art entered his life early: he studied with the artist Kjell Nupen. His first solo exhibition, “Maleri” (“Painting”), took place in 1989, and in 1996 he won a prize for the best lithograph at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo (Høstutstillingen). He works in painting, printmaking, etching, woodcut, ceramics, glass, sound and installation. His exhibitions include “Kutt / Cuts” (1995), “Pincette” (2001), “Payne’s Gray” (2004), “Climax” (2007), “Norwegian Wood” (2013), “Self-Portraits” (2014) and “IGNIS” (2019). His work has been shown at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter near Oslo and at the London Art Fair, and “Peeling a Glass Onion” (2015) was made together with Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. In 2025 the National Arts Club in New York showed 49 of his prints, inspired by Henri Matisse’s designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence.

There are also commissions for public places. In 2001 he was asked to design an official Norwegian postage stamp. In 2003 came “Resonance” for the city of Bergen, and in 2007 “Climax” for the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. In 2005 he decorated eleven decks of the cruise ship Adventure of the Seas with his glass panels. In 2016 the park “Imprints” opened at Fornebu: it took about fifty tonnes of clay.

Music outside a-ha went on in parallel. With Kjetil Bjerkestrand he recorded film music under the name Timbersound, and for the music to the series “Hotel Oslo” they received an Edvard Prize in 1998. In 2004 came his first solo album, “Past Perfect Future Tense”, with members of Coldplay and Travis, and in 2008 the second, “A Dot of Black in the Blue of Your Bliss”. In 2008, with Guy Berryman of Coldplay and Jonas Bjerre of Mew, he formed Apparatjik, a collective that played in museums and galleries, among them the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2012 Furuholmen was a mentor on the Norwegian television show “The Voice”, and his contestant Martin Halla won. He wrote the music for the film “Beatles” (2014). He designed the artwork for his solo album “White Xmas Lies” (2019) himself, and used its Christmas theme as an occasion to criticise consumerism.

In 2012 King Harald made all three members of a-ha Knights First Class of the Order of St. Olav, and in 2017 the University of Agder awarded Furuholmen an honorary doctorate.