Wry: Jockum Nordström comes to Zeno X Gallery

I think that Wry, the exhibition of Jockum Nordström, is really interesting. Here follows the press release from Zeno X Gallery.

Jockum Nordström (°1963, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden) makes fragile collages and graphite drawings in which he evokes a surprising universe, populated with old school sailors, jazz musicians, delicately chronicled flora and fauna, ships and noblemen from past epochs… With fine, sharp lines, he draws and pastes his figures on white paper sheets, the background sometimes covered with watery, coloured parts but mostly blank, only filled with blurred, gray clouds.

Because of the difference in scale and the collage-like effect maintained in the drawings - there is no actual cutting and pasting -, the assembled fragments seem to float into the space. They preserve a certain feeling of closeness, as if the artist has cut them out of their own world and abruptly placed them in his new, strange universe in which they firmly continue to refer to other contexts.

While looking at Nordström’s work, these excerpts and particularly their very specific mode of representation, trigger our imagination and a story starts to develop like a fine, curving line. In Windfall the story can take the shape of a fairytale, starring two men and cheerful animals, chasing each other in a circular rhythm. But it can also take on more complex forms, as in Age of Optimism, where systematically drawn galleons, fishes, icebergs and architectural elements, tell the big story of occidental imperialism and the development of a Darwinist way of thinking. By using the rather childlike techniques of drawing and collage, Nordström disrupts these big stories and places them in a new perspective.

The same moving fragility can be discovered in both the sculptures presented at the exhibition. As scale models of an obsolete modernist dream, these buildings show the empty space behind their façade and their breakable, cardboard skeleton.

Wry is the first exhibition of Jockum Nordström in Belgium.
He previously exposed at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the MOMA in New York.

He is represented by Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm and David Zwirner in New York.
Nordström’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MOMA in New York, and many private collections in Europe and the United States.



Info:


JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM
Wry
January 30 – March 14, 2009
Wednesday – Saturday 2-6 pm or by appointment

Zeno X Gallery


Leopold de Waelplaats 16 – BE - 2000 Antwerpt: +3232161626 - f: +3232160992 - e: info@zeno-x.com -
http://www.zeno-x.com/

Also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgaleNlWmLw