Pour ne pas dormir

A major figure on the Swedish art scene, Jockum Nordström has devoted over thirty years to his mischievous mix of worlds quotidian and oneiric, human and animal, abstract and naive, natural and architectural. At La Criée centre for contemporary art he's presenting a selection of recent works: collages, drawings and cardboard sculptures.

When worlds intersect

Jockum Nordström is also an illustrator of children's books and a musician. His work is fuelled by references to popular and outsider art, jazz and Surrealism, in addition to architecture, Swedish culture and contemporary art. Out of all this emerge dreamlike fables in which different worlds and eras intermingle. The power of his work resides in the tension he sets up between simplicity of line and polyphony of subject matter. Among   his passions are architecture and a fascination with interiors and furniture going back to his childhood in the Stockholm suburbs, when the housing estates were being built. In his work architecture can be seen in both two and three dimensions. At La Criée he's showing a series of fragile geometrical sculptures, el cheapo residential blocks whose slender lines contradict the saddening clunkiness of their originals. Nordström defies and defeats pigeonholing: in his case the "supposedly badly made" is very well made – and deliberately so. He emphasises the liberating force of an expressiveness that simultaneously plays on and shakes off the shackles of convention: his forms and characters spill out of the frame, his lines can be messy or wobbly, his paint runs intentional; there are unfinished bits, crude cuts, crooked folds. Plus a sense of composition made all the more striking by its sheer zaniness.

When abstraction and narrative come together

Jockum Nordström's commitment to forms and colours in their primal state is matched by his interest in narrative, whether real or imaginary. Here we have a storyteller moving back and forth between worlds, between characters and scenes, in a mingling of the childlike and the sexy, the contemporary and the timeless, the figurative and the abstract. The collages on show are in earth colours: greens, dirty yellows, greys, diluted browns and faded blues, with touches here and there of darker, more saturated tones in the same range. The drawings illustrate the dexterity of someone who has been practising since he was a child.

curator

Sophie Kaplan

production

La Criée centre for contemporary art, Rennes

COVID-19

Entrance conditions have been adapted in line with the obligatory preventive measures. No reservation is necessary, the capacity is limited.

Jockum Nordström, Kvällen kommer (Evening comes), 2017 138,0 × 67,0 cm, collage, watercolor and graphite on paper

© Jockum Nordström courtesy the artist and Galleri Magnus Karlsson photo: Per-Erik Adamsson

Jockum Nordström, Kvällen kommer (Evening comes), 2017 138,0 × 67,0 cm, collage, aquarelle et graphite sur papier

© Jockum Nordström courtesy de l'artiste et de la galerie Magnus Karlsson photo : Per-Erik Adamsson

Jockum Nordström

born in 1963 in Stockholm, Sweden lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

• represented by
• Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm
• Zeno X Gallery, Anvers
• David Zwirner, New York, Londres, Paris, Hong Kong