Thursday, April 11, 2013

All I Have Learned And Forgotten Again

For the past fortnight or so I've been leafing through the pages of this beautifully presented monograph on the renowned Swedish artist Jockum Nordström. Comprising of almost a hundred works, the book is a strange unfolding hinterland of oddly poetic images. Objects, animals and people are painted, drawn and collaged into uncanny, open-ended narratives. There is a peculiar yet appealing discomposure to much of Nordström's work. His images manage to marry a finely tuned sense of draughtsmanship with an oddly naïve charm creating a disconcerting visual landscape populated by owls, stark Modernist architecture, tall ships, and Victorian Dandies. With each successive image, Nordström presents a liminal world of strange frailties where folk art charm sits uneasily next to the peccadilloes of an industrial age, a world where despite the forest of suburban signifiers, the feeling is very much pre electric, otherworldly  and magical. A superb publication.

All I Have Learned And Forgotten Again is published by Hatje Cantz

For more info on Jockum Nordström, see previous posts here, here and here.




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