Primary influences by the painters Rembrandt and Caravaggio help place his work in direct conflict with abstraction and conceptual art.

His Norwegian parents were resistance fighters who had fled German-occupied Norway to Helsingborg, Sweden during World War II where Nerdrum, subsequently, was born.

His parents, then Resistance fighters, had been sent to Sweden from German-occupied Norway to direct guerrilla activities from outside the country.

The system was based on anthroposophy that saw mankind as once living in harmony with the universe but now existing in a lesser state of rationality.

Through spiritual or esoteric practice, Steiner believed mankind could find its way back to a connection with higher realities and to renewed harmony with the universe.

Jens Bjørneboe, Norwegian author and mentor, said Nerdrum even at a young age exhibited tendencies of innate talent and industry, but also impatience with those with less ability than himself.

[12][13][14][15] Nerdrum began study at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts, but became dissatisfied with the direction of modern art, notably Rauschenberg's work, and began to teach himself how to paint in a Neo-Baroque style, with the guidance of Rembrandt's technique and work as a primary influence.

Nerdrum had seen Rembrandt's painting, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm.

[16] By abandoning the accepted path of modern art, Nerdrum had placed himself in direct opposition to most aspects of the school, including his primary painting instructor, his fellow students, and a curriculum designed to present Norway as a country with an up-to-date artistic culture.

"[6] Rembrandt and Caravaggio are primary influences on Nerdrum's work, while secondary influences include Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, and the less obvious influences, according to Vine and either mentioned by Nerdrum himself or other critics, that include Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Goya, Chardin, Millet, as well as the even less apparent Henry Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich, Ferdinand Hodler, Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz, Salvador Dalí, Chaïm Soutine and Lars Hertervig.

[6] Nerdrum's work from the first twenty years of his artistic life consisted of large canvasses, generally polemic in nature, that served to refute accepted social or economic viewpoints.

The work from this period was highly representational and detailed in nature with often careful attention to contemporary references, such as in clothing, or in the model of a bicycle as in the painting The Arrest.

Vine notes that, Nerdrum's influence was not, as might be expected, given the themes of the work, the ideological Ashcan school movement, although similar in subject matter.

As well, Nerdrum was a reader of visionary literature that included works by Rudolf Steiner, the prophetic William Blake, the dark Dostoyevsky, and the mystical Swedenborg.

His disillusionment with modern art, such as Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram,[18] a stuffed goat with a tire around its middle section standing on a flat, littered surface, which Nerdrum had encountered in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, filled the young artist with disgust.

Nerdrum, according to Vine, later considered the work to be naive in the sense that Rousseau defines the word, in which mankind is seen as innocent and innately good.

Paintings were no longer as multi-figured as they had been with Refugees at Sea, and still lifes were of individual objects such as a brick or loaf of bread.

These figures — types rather than endowed with features or apparent stories that might distinguish them as individual — were costumed in garments that seemed timeless such as furs, skins, or leather caps, rather than in clothing that would link the viewer to a specific time and place.

Archetypal-like, these beings, inhabited pre-social, apocalyptic-like circumstances that included stark, severe landscapes, a reference to some place beyond our own time and space.

In 2011, Nerdrum stated that the technique he used in the 1980s was faulty, "a special mixture of oils and wax in an effort to recreate the style of the old masters" which subsequently melted and disintegrated.

[27] After three trial days, Nerdrum was once again convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to two years and ten months in prison.

[33] Australian choreographer, Meryl Tankard's 2009 dance piece, The Oracle, was inspired by the work of Nerdrum.

[34] The Norwegian classical composer Martin Romberg wrote a collection of piano pieces inspired by three of Nerdrum's works in 2014, named Tableaux Kitsch.

The pieces are inspired by the paintings To the Lighthouse, Stranded, and Drifting, and were premiered at Nerdrum's exhibitions in Paris 2013 and Barcelona 2016.