Lars-Gunnar Nordström
Galerie Forsblom Stockholm
February 21–March 22
Opening February 20, 5–7pm
Lars-Gunnar Nordström was one of the most ground-breaking artists within abstract art in Finland. In the early 1950’s, he created his own language as a painter, graphic artist and sculptor in the context of concrete art. His education as an interior designer is shown in the forms, proportions and graphical lines of his dynamic paintings. Recurring elements are elemental shapes like circles, rectangles, vertical and diagonal cross sections. It is a modern expression, characterized by precision and stringency.
Comparable to building blocks, a shadow play is created by the contrasts between black and white surfaces and primary colors such as red, green and blue. L-G Nordström's work is systematically and carefully constructed with no more than seven colors in a painting. The lines have a direction and a continuous movement into infinity; corresponding to works by the Swedish artist Olle Baertling. Occasionally, a straight line forms a horizon and sharp edges meet a curved shape resembling a construction, an abutment.
Nordström also created sculptures in which his graphic elements are given additional space in the three-dimensional form. The sculptures are gracefully architectural but also playful; some of them almost recall a human shape. The spatial expression in Nordström's art creates a dynamic construction of composition and rhythm, similar to a piece of music. Nordström’s musically inspired expression reverberates also in the viewer. He was a passionate jazz fan with one of the largest private jazz collections in Finland. For him, it was natural to view color and form similar to how you hear sound and notes in music. Music from L-G Nordström's jazz collection will be played to accompany his artwork on selected occasions during the exhibition period.
L-G Nordström (1924–2014) studied at the Aalto University and has participated in numerous exhibitions both in Finland and abroad, since the 1950’s. In 2015 there was a grand retrospective of the artist at the EMMA–Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland. L-G Nordströms works are represented in public collections such as Amos Rex Art Museum, Helsinki, Tampere Art Museum, Turku Art Museum, Finland; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France and Arithmeum-museum, Bonn, Germany. The exhibition was co-produced with the L-G Nordström Foundation.