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MARTIN GUSTAVSSON
NATURAL

Reminder, last day:
Saturday, September 25th, 12:00 - 16:00 pm

Sturegatan 24, 114 36 Stockholm
15 - 25 september, 2021

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In the exhibition Natural by Martin Gustavsson is a series of new paintings and a few older works where notions of nature's various expressions appear. Nature in the form of flowers, fruits and human bodies has always existed in Martin Gustavsson's imagery as a metaphor for life and human desires but also for darkness and anger. The new paintings reveal intense and fragmented images in tune with our contemporary world but also with references to the older paintings. They were shown for the first time in the exhibition Wrath of God (2007), which through their biblical and (homo) erotic references expressed an unusual and apocalyptic vision of the future. The author and critic Carl-Johan Malmberg described the exhibition as a representation of "a number of Old Testament moments of crisis" that were "uniquely executed and literally piercing to observe" (SvD 28/4 2007).

In Martin Gustavsson's most recent works, there is an energy and expressiveness that connects to this earlier exhibition. Colours and shapes are spread across the canvas and create different fields of vibrant energy through faces, hands, flowers, and plants. Have we come to the burning moment that Martin Gustavsson had before his eyes in 2007? As if the world falls apart just like a beautiful flower whose foliage slowly decays and dismembers. It is at once fascinating and disturbing, beautiful, and fateful, as in a poem by Arthur Rimbaud.

Works by Martin Gustavsson are currently also on display at Moderna Museet's permanent collection in Stockholm. Martin Gustavsson is educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm and Middlesex University, London and has exhibited in Sweden and internationally since the 1990s. In 2019, he showed the acclaimed exhibition "Un Chant Ecarlate" at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and a version of "In No Particular Order" at Galleri Flach. Martin Gustavsson is currently based in Stockholm but continues to work periodically in London where he was based previously. He teaches at Konstfack in Stockholm and has in recent years also conducted several workshops and exhibitions with students in Lima, Peru.