Jockum Nordström – Without Lantern

Jockum Nordström’s drawings, collages, illustrations and books are appreciated all over the world. With paper, scissors, pencil, watercolour and crayon, he creates an entirely personal pictorial world where childhood memories merge with the adult world, imagination and dreams.

The exhibition Without Lantern presents sculptures, collages and sketches, and focuses on Nordström’s artistic process. Much has been brought directly from his studio and has never before been shown. In the collages, images cut from magazines and books meet each other in new contexts. In other works, sheets of paper saturated with colour have been folded into large “fortune tellers” with secret content. Nordström builds architectural dreams out of old matchboxes, and in the cardboard sculptures he depicts the architectural vision of modernism. Several of the exhibition’s matchbox sculptures relate to a new project, Triumfbåge för halta (Triumphal Arch for the Lame), a large concrete sculpture planned for a new residential area in Stockholm.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is the large shadow play installation The Anchor Hits the Sand (2019), shown here for the first time in Sweden. Nordström’s characteristic paper figures emerge on a screen of semi-transparent paper in an ever-changing play of light and shadows. The reverse side of the installation offers an insight into the mechanical design of this completely analogue work – don’t miss it! The music, a sound collage composed by Rudolf Nordström, using a collection of old 78 rpm records, enhances the magical atmosphere. The Anchor Hits the Sand has previously been shown at David Zwirner’s London gallery in 2019. In connection with the exhibitions, the sound collage The Murray Collection is released as a vinyl record with a cover by the artist. The album and several of Nordström’s exhibition catalogues and picture books are sold in the Museum Shop.

The sketch is commonly known as the rough outline of a piece of work, offering the historian or visitor to an art exhibition a clue to the original thinking. The preliminary study might reveal the way things were meant to be. In this [Nordström’s] case, the sketch or maquette scarcely offers an answer. This is not a preliminary study, but rather the study itself. A way of thinking. A room to be in. A place for open-ended questions.

Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, ’Then and Now. Here and There.’, in Jockum Nordström: For the Insects and the Hounds. Drawings, Collages and Sculptures 2014–2017 (Antwerp: Zeno X Books, 2019).

Jockum Nordström (born 1963) is one of Sweden’s most internationally acclaimed artists. He had his international breakthrough in 2000, and has since exhibited at galleries and art institutions in numerous countries. Without Lantern is his first major exhibition at a Swedish art museum since 2005. Nordström’s works can be found in several major museum collections. He has been a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts since 2004. Jockum Nordström lives and works in Stockholm and on Gotland.

THANKS TO
Jockum Nordström, Carl Fredrik Hårleman, Sofia Jönsson, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, and David Zwirner, London.