Johan Wahlstrom Exhibition

Van Der Plas Gallery

poster for Johan Wahlstrom Exhibition
[Image: "Let us Take you Down Part two" (2015) Acrylic, Color Pigments, Silver Metal, News Paper Cuts, Varnish on Canvas , 25.6 x 17.3 in.]

This event has ended.

Johan Wahlstrom is a fifth-generation and internationally recognized artist, exhibited in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Elmhurst/Chicago, Miami, London, Berlin, Milan, Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Zurich, Amsterdam, Bologna, Malaga and Stockholm (to name a few cities).

Currently he is in a 4 month long artist in residency program with Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation/Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.

He started his current series House Of Lies, Spring 2014 using black, brown and shades of grey dominate his work. Individuals in pain, screaming to be heard, their faces joining in resemblance and suffering, their heads delineated by a thick black outline, crowds moving together, in a united feel seemingly protesting ‘enough is enough!’. The people depicted in Wahlstrom’s canvases become a ‘whole’ each withholding their own emotion and struggle yet united through a common dissatisfaction and rage towards society. Wahlstrom is painting you, me, himself; he is portraying us,‘we’, the individuals that populate this planet.

It takes many singular fragments to make up a mass. A group harbours its power in its entirety yet cannot exist without considering every unique element as a necessity to build and strengthen its structure. Wahlstrom applies this when creating his paintings, concen- trating each brush stroke as a gesture, a distinguishing movement representative of our diversity. He describes this process saying, ‘I also use the rhythm in the music to set the tempo for how I move the brushes on the canvas, you could say that I try to dance with the brushes to the music’. With this technique embracing the music as guidance to his hand, he first outlines the figures and progressively layers them, bit by bit, adding to their complexity.

He fearlessly states that it is ‘his duty’ to paint about today’s society, unravelling the lingering despair that we all conceal inside.
‘I see myself as a storyteller and I want my voice to be heard in the daily debate’. He philosophically embraces the little imperfections in his work and talks about the importance of risk taking in the intensity of an experience lived to its fullest. He is driven and a firm militant for a world with ‘…less lies, less greed, less war, less poverty, less religion, less violence, less people in jail, less child abuse, less problems with the environment and so on…’. With bold ideas resulting in visually substantial work, Wahlstrom is human, and acts it, without tricks or overloaded fakery; he remains himself.

Born in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lives and works in Malaga, Spain.

Media

Schedule

from November 20, 2015 to December 20, 2015

Closing Reception on 2015-12-19 from 16:00 to 18:00

Artist(s)

Johan Wahlstrom

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