JESPER NYRÉN

LOCATION

11 NOVEMBER – 11 DECEMBER 2022

REVIEWED BY

OMKONST
21 NOVEMBER 2022

SVENSKA

I think of my work as a compilation of impressions – different cut-outs of a landscape placed on top of each other, bringing images with me home and putting them together in a new way. This way of sorting and stacking has both to do with form and with content. A stack becomes a kind of visual memory, an assemblage of what remains of an experience – and the actual work as a way of trying to remember.

Welcome to Jesper Nyrén's first exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition Location consists of a series of new paintings which explore themes such as light, repetition and materiality. The paintings are based on different places at different times and seasons.

Real places become imaginary spaces when Jesper Nyrén creates paintings from landscapes where he has lived and worked. Most of the paintings are painted at Björkö, where Nyrén had his home for many years. But a number of paintings originate from journeys he undertook in the footsteps of older artists. Tempo and color differ depending on whether the place is Aix en Provence or northern Italy, whether the inspiration was the work of Cézanne, Piero della Francesca or Fra'Angelico. However, Jesper Nyrén's paintings are no reproductions. He seeks to recreate, or rather perhaps enable the viewer, the sensation of an atmosphere and a light the artist himself experienced at the specific time and place.

There exists an aspiration and a balancing act in these paintings, which is about creating a whole. An interplay between surface and depth is paired with a quest for a purely structural harmony. Unlike previous works with different materials such as sand mixed into the paint to create a concrete physical separation between the color fields, in these new paintings the artist has worked more purely with the paint and through different layers and density brought out an interaction between the transparent and open and the more covering and closed surfaces. The composition of the paintings is based on a broken symmetry. The displacements of the lines create a tension and a movement in the paintings that make them exist on several levels; through abstraction and figuration, light and dark, weight and weightlessness. Jesper Nyrén works like a composer and each painted field carries a memory and a mood that together form a composition, becoming a musical score for the eye of the beholder.

JESPER NYRÉN, born 1979 in Sala, currently lives and works in Stockholm. Nyrén holds a MFA from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, 2007. His work has been shown at Ronneby Konsthall; Norrtälje konsthall; Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm and Helsinki; Enköpings konstmuseum; Åbo Art Museum; Långban Moderna / Värmlands museum; Aguelimuseet; and the Borås International Sculpture Biennale. Jesper Nyrén has received the Baertling Foundation Grant; Marabouparken’s P.A.N.K Grant; Stockholm City Culture Grant; Carl Larsson’s Grant; three times the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation Grant; several working grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, among others. Jesper Nyrén’s work is in the permanent collection of the Public Art Agency Sweden; the County Council in Stockholm, Uppsala, Sörmland, Dalarna; Värmdö County; Sundbyberg City; Solna City; Västerås Art Museum; and Åbo Art Museum. He has made several public installations, among them New Karolinska, Solna; Gullmarsplan subway station, Stockholm; the façade at the Kv. Simonsland, Borås; Queen Silvia’s Child Hospital, Gothenburg; and Gävle Hospital, Sweden.

Installation images Jean-Baptiste Béranger