Pseudo-naive and funny, Jockum Nordström's works compress a bundle of simultaneous narratives in a single frozen frame. He says, "A single picture of mine may often be based on a multiple of originals. I am constantly looking at my immediate surroundings as well as books." Art, photographs, people, plants, architecture, patterns, textiles, sex, and history all play an important role in his compositions. His enigmatic scenes, rendered in drawings and mixed-media pieces in watercolor, gouache, and collage, seem at once old-fashioned and modern. Lucas Cranach and James Ensor are longstanding influences, as are folk art and Surrealism. His art seems to portray suppressed fantasies fighting their way into the consciousnesses of the flattened-out figures. Fantasy has the power to transform banal, alienating tasks into moments that shimmer with humor and poignancy.

Jockum Nordström

Arts & Photography

Vallejo, César

Bobrowski, Johannes

Szymborska, Wisława

History & Criticism

Steidl/Moderna Museet, Stockholm

This catalogue from an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm unites three modern photographic masters who worked in black-and-white and found their subjects in the characters of the urban street: Diane Arbus, Lisette Model and Christer Stràmholm. Portraits take precedence here. Arbus and Model ventured into New York to find their gallery of faces, while Stràmholm wandered through Paris. No matter where they went, their eyes were finely tuned to the variety of human emotion and experience passing on the sidewalks. Arbus's photographs here are drawn from the 1960s, particularly those which were included in the first book devoted to her work published by Aperture in 1972. With Model emphasis is on her work in America from the 1940s onwards. Stràmholm is primarily represented by pictures from Paris taken during the 1960s, when he made his famous portraits of transvestites at the Place Blanche, but also included is a selection of photos from his trips to the United States.

Arbus, Model, Strömholm

Photography & Video

The extraordinary painting Black and White: Suprematist Composition (1915) by Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) lies at the center of this compact volume. Recent conservation work has helped scholars to understand this single work better, and its story will help readers understand both the history of twentieth-century art and the process of keeping it in good health. Black and White was examined with optic and electron microscopes, spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, and, after having spent years rolled up, it was flattened on a vacuum table, after which loose paint around the edges was consolidated with tools as basic as a heated spatula and glue. But don't try this at home. Dr. Andrei Nakov, a pioneering Malevich expert and the author of Malevitch ecritsand Kazimir Malewicz: Catalogue raisonne writes about the history of the painting in an essay accompanied by 30 color plates.

Kasimir Malevich: Black and White: Suprematist Composition (1915)

Reference

Although Paul McCarthy was born in 1945, has been working for nearly 40 years and is counted among the most influential figures of his generation, he didn't become known to the general public until the early 1990s. Because of this, and because he has frequently collaborated with younger artists like Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, many people think mistakenly that McCarthy belongs to a younger generation. Perhaps this is also because his portfolio includes works like the 1993 Spaghetti Man, a mannequin-like child figure with a penis so long it coils in front of him, who likes to stand around galleries in nothing but a T-shirt and a furry bunny face mask. Works like these--uneasy, funny, wise--undertake a critical processing of Western culture, its traumas and taboos, and the institutions that shape its denizens. Hollywood, Disney and the family are a few of McCarthy's direct sources of inspiration. Head Shop/Shop Head: Works 1966-2006 features seven large installations, 15 large sculptures, two inflatable ones, drawings, photos and film, all of which are featured at the important retrospective mounted by Sweden's Moderna Museet in the summer of 2006.

Paul McCarthy: Head Shop. Shop Head: Works, 1966-2006

MCEVILLEY, Thomas

Blazwick, Iwona

The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with dreams, fairy tales and the details of everyday life. Her passion for storytelling means that every dark maelstrom is scattered with structuring elements: a window, a television, someone looking at a painting. Her early works feature children in vast landscapes, forests, lakes and countryside that echo her own childhood in northern Sweden, (she was born in Luleå in 1962). In later pieces, this rural setting yields to the interiors of the art world--cluttered framers' workshops, libraries and elegant salons. Most recently, these rooms have opened up towards new realms, where the finely ornamented objects from Andersson's gallery scenes seem at home, dreamlike, in the wilderness, with paintings hanging from snowy mountains. Whatever her motifs, the atmosphere is always one of serenity and wonder, a moment of appreciation between finding and forgetting. Today, Andersson is one of Sweden's most internationally recognized artists, with recent solo exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. She represented her country at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was also featured at the 2004 Berlin Biennial and the Sydney Biennial, 2006.

Karin Mamma Andersson

Merewether, Charles

Noring, Ann-Sofi