The best Nordic art prints: a buying guide

Sixteen prints, four artists, and one problem with the word best: it means nothing until you know who's asking. We've already written the seven prints we'd hang first, and if you want our opinion, start there. This guide answers the question a search for the best Nordic art prints, or the best Scandinavian art prints, is really asking: which print is best for you, your walls and the room it has to live in. All four artists here live and work in Norway, so whichever word you searched, the prints qualify.

It comes down to three choices. Bold or quiet. A picture of something, or a shape. And which room gets it. Work through those in order and the field narrows itself.

Bold or quiet?

Start with the room's volume, not the print's. A room that's already busy, colour on the walls, pattern in the textiles, wants a quiet print. A pale, restrained room can afford a loud one, and usually needs it.

The loudest print we sell is IThinkIThink by Helene Brox: a cobalt head on shocking pink, spelling out its confession, I think I think too much, in green brush strokes while red squiggles loop through the profile like thoughts refusing to settle. It's also the most instantly likeable thing in the gallery, which is rarer than loud. Dragon, by the same hand, is bold in a darker register, a beast glimpsed in fragments, ribbons of white, red and pink on a black ground that gives every colour real bite. It needs a wall that can hold its nerve. And if bold means colour rather than volume, Trysilkaffe by Ingunn Dybendal crams a green mug with an impossible bouquet, every folk flower a different invention, pattern on pattern in the best Nordic tradition of cheerfully too much.

At the quiet end, Tree Top Peach weaves branches and dozens of hidden birds into a soft peach lattice, closer to a folk papercut than an illustration, and it settles a room without vanishing into it. Swallow Dive is the pick if you can't decide between the poles: two colours only, cobalt birds diving over warm cream, all the movement carried by shape alone. It's the rare print that's both calm and confident, and the one we'd suggest first to anyone buying a single piece.

A picture of something, or a shape?

Nordic art gets filed under minimalism, but half of what we sell is pictures of real things: tables, breakfasts, a whole lobster. If you want a print that's plainly about something, Sia Siamos paints food the way you actually meet it. Hummer og Vin looks straight down on a summer table, lobster on a blue platter, lemons, glasses of red, hands reaching in from the edges as if the scene is mid-conversation. Morgenlevering is the morning version, cafetière coffee and croissants on a checked cloth, everything tilted towards you as if you've just pulled up a chair. Simen Wahlqvist is figurative in his own way: each print is one joke told in as few lines as the joke will allow, like Slingshot, a peace sign turned catapult with a small, contented figure loaded in the palm below.

If you'd rather have shape than subject, Helene Brox's Dancer is movement with the figure pared away, a cream figure mid-stride on sky blue, no face and no floor, arms rippling like ribbons caught in their own momentum. And Eltsjoen by Ingunn Dybendal is the in-between case worth knowing about: a real Nordic lake landscape redrawn entirely as coloured-pencil pattern, pink sky, folk-motif forest, water pooling in pale rings around a bridge. It's the most detailed piece in the gallery and it rewards the hundredth look as much as the first.

One practical steer: flat, graphic work reads best from across a room, while detail like Eltsjoen's earns close range. Choose by where you'll actually be standing when you look at it.

Which room gets it?

The kitchen or dining wall is the easiest call in the gallery, because Siamos's four table scenes were made for exactly that company. Vinkveld, a wine evening in thick, glossy strokes with the cork already adrift, is the evening pick; Hyttefrokost is the sunniest, ripe tomatoes and holiday ease against green kitchen tiles. All four hang together on the kitchen collection.

For a home office, Wahlqvist's dry line drawings do more than any motivational poster. Mean Snothing gives an orange man a Newton's cradle for eyes, one ball caught mid-swing, the face underneath staying perfectly deadpan, and it earns a second look from every guest. Morgenstrekk is the gentlest of his prints, a figure with a charging cable wound round him, unplugged from the night and reaching for a small sun, and the one to choose if the office is also where the day starts.

Bedrooms want the quiet end of the first question: Tree Top Peach, Swallow Dive, or Eltsjoen hung where you can keep finding new corners of it. The living room takes the widest range of anything, which is why the living room collection is our largest; if the wall is big and pale, that's where the bold prints belong.

An honest word about best

We're a small Norwegian-run gallery, and these sixteen are everything we sell, so take our best the way you'd take any shop's. There's good Nordic work beyond these walls: museums print their collections, and many artists sell their own editions directly, which is a lovely way to buy once you've found an artist you already love. What we can offer honestly is a catalogue small enough to know stroke by stroke, four artists we work with directly, and a page where every recommendation comes with its reasons attached. If none of the sixteen is your print, no page titled best should talk you into one.

The practical part

Every print is made to order, printed for you when you buy rather than pulled from a shelf. Most are 50 x 70 cm; Wahlqvist's square illustrations are 50 x 50 cm, and each product page lists the size for that piece. Framed or unframed is your call: the frames come in wood, black or white, sized to the print, and if you're buying more than one, keeping the frame the same across the set makes the wall read as one decision. Delivery is worldwide, with the cost shown at checkout, and you have 14 days from delivery to change your mind.

If you know the print but not the wall, the print size guide works through it room by room. If you'd rather browse than choose, the whole gallery sits on one page: Scandinavian wall art.