ART-PREVIEW:Jockum Nordström-The Anchor Hits the Sand
Delicately and elegantly constructed, Swedish artist Jockum Nordström’s collages, watercolors, graphite drawings, and architectural sculptures feel improvisational and spontaneous, yet rich in detail. Like a number of artists working in illustrative media (Neo Rauch or Amy Cutler, for example) Nordström balances representational elements with a barrage of disjunctions: doses of Surrealism, logical incongruities, rifts between form and content, unexplored allusions.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Jockum Nordström in his solo exhibition “The Anchor Hits the Sand” debuts a new large-scale immersive environment, which ise installed on the David Zwirner’s London Gallery first floor. The presentation also includes a range of the artist’s recent drawings and collages. At once intimate, evocative, and meditative, the new environment encountered by viewers through a veil composed of semitransparent paper (in fact, the same paper used to create his collages); behind which cutouts of buildings, trees, and animal and human forms are suspended between the ceiling and floor by rotating wire mobiles that are illuminated by color wheels, animating the paper’s surface in a play of light and shadow. A musical element a composition of found and new sounds recorded in collaboration with the music producer Rudolf Nordström, lends another dramatic dimension to the overall work. From the ground floor, where the collages and drawings are presented, visitors are able to hear the musical composition above, further connecting the imagery within the two spaces. Entering the first-floor galleries, audiences have two ways of experiencing the environment. Proceeding to the front of the space offers a view of the screenlike veil upon which shadow, light, and imagery are projected. Visitors are also encouraged to view the work from the back of the space and observe the materials and mechanics of the enveloping sculptural display. The new graphite drawings and watercolor collages included in the exhibition expand on the motifs and imaginative spirit that have come to define Nordström’s broader oeuvre. Each work is populated by a cast of anonymous figures whose relationships and identities are never fully revealed. Nordström cuts out and paints the individual humans and animals he uses in the collages separately from one another, later bringing them together within the composition in surprising, humorous, and mysterious ways. As with the collages, Nordström’s graphite drawings often feature characters in antiquated attire going about their daily routines. The scenes unfold across domestic interiors, public spaces, municipal buildings, and art galleries, among other locales. The depictions appear like discrete vignettes, yet they are rife with detail and nuance, suggesting larger narratives and events that previously occurred or that are unfolding outside of the frame.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street London, Duration: 22/11-20/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
