Dream life

Martin Wickström and Carin Ellberg are exhibiting paintings from the middle of their careers: two position fixes.

Martin Wickström creates art from play and sorrow – I remember the centrifugal power from an earlier exhibition about a friend who died while climbing K2. His new exhibition at Galleri Engström is rather centripetal and spreads in various directions: cinematic mythology, 60s aesthetics and a whole bunch of sawed out shapes, like a jig saw puzzle on the walls. You get an impression of a purposeful simplicity, sometimes it’s almost trivial. But is the simplicity a camouflage? Because disguise is sub theme in the exhibition: among the flowers one of Goya’s tortured bodies is hidden, in the green house a crime scene from Psycho, and the extrovert holds melancholy.

Carin Ellberg at Andréhn-Schiptjenko is showing a very long painting of seven pictures, unevenly put together. Together they form a dreamy and introvert tale or reflection with the title Rinnande träd i olika världar. The paint runs like tears and rain, or pours out of prison like buildings. Interior and exterior blended together, within and out of the bodily. The theme of architecture and pattern goes back to the installation Sunrise, but in this case not in the form of panty hose and other ready mades but oil on canvas. We see traces of Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Louise Ekman and Art Brut outsiders, but strangely enough without it being a cliché: a naked, meditative drama, told through a subtle color expressionism.

 

Peter Cornell
Expressen, september 2004

 

Drömliv

Martin Wickström och Carin Ellberg ställer ut måleri från mitten av sin levnads bana: två positionsbestämningar.

Martin Wickström gör konst av lek och sorg – jag minns den centrifugala kraften i en tidigare utställning om en vän som omkommit vid en bestigning av K2. Hans nya utställning på Galleri Engström är snarare centripetal och sprider sig i olika riktningar: filmmytologi, 60-talsestetik, och en massa figurer utsågade som pusselbitar över väggarna.
Den ger ett intryck av målmedveten lätthet, ja, ibland blir det till och med lättviktigt. Är lättheten ett camouflage? För maskering är ett undertema i utställningen: i blomstren döljer sig en torterad kropp av Goya, i växthuset en brottsplats från Psycho, och i det extroverta melankolin.

Carin Ellberg på Andréhn-Schiptjenko visar en mycket lång målning av sju ojämnt hopfogade bilder. Tillsammans bildar de en drömsk och introvert berättelse eller betraktelse med titeln Rinnande träd i olika världar. Färg rinner som tårar och regn, eller väller ut ur fängelseliknande byggnader. Interiör och exteriör glider ihop, inomkroppsligt och utomkroppsligt. Temat arkitektur och mönster går igen från installationenSunrise, men här inte i form av strumpbyxor och andra ready mades utan olja på duk.
Vi ser spår av Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Louise Ekman och särlingar i Art Brut men på något underligt sätt utan att det stelnar i schabloner: en naken meditativ dramatik, förmedlad genom en subtil färgexpressionism.

Peter Cornell
Expressen, september 2004

Screwed montages 

Nothing is stable in Martin Wickström’s imagery, motifs from different contexts are mixed together without obvious connections. Perhaps they are best described as montages, since the paintings have various objects screwed onto their surfaces. At Galleri Engström you can view figure sawed silhouettes mounted on the paintings, forcing themselves into the motifs. In a different series the silhouettes appear to be sawed out of large paintings that later have been discarded.

Wickström’s imagery often consists of the everyday and the universal. In the paintings we find landscapes and architectural environments, in the silhouettes we discern cityscapes, birds, cameras and a child soldier. The different contexts drastically change the meaning of the motifs: a white silhouette of a boy soldier, mounted on a painting of Anita Ekberg is obviously something different than the same silhouette cut out of a giant flower pattern.

This is not only a play with visual signifiers. Wickström has chosen with great care, and for those who look closely there are many “traces” that that work like connections. One trace is cinema, with distinct references to actors and film cameras, as well as subtle connections to specific movies.

The references also extend to the visual language of both modernism and industrialism, as well as to Wickström’s own practice.

But I still believe that those who look for a real “meaning” miss out on something significant. Wickström’s attention fully includes issues of composition and scale. It is this attention to the visual that ties the exhibition together and it is also the visual aspect that decides the outcome of the montages. That becomes clear in a small model where an airplane flies “through” several layers of kaleidoscopic mounted images. Suggestive patterns form which sometimes makes it impossible to make out what the image depicts. But it’s not always that important. Wickström shows us that the meaning of an image not always lies in what it represents. That makes the works visually strong but at the same time difficult to grasp.

 

Håkan Nilsson

DN, August 2004

Skruvade montage

Inget är stabilt i Martin Wickströms bildvärld, bilder från olika motivvärldar blandas utan uppenbara kopplingar. Kanske beskrivs de bäst som montage, eftersom målningarna har olika objekt fastskruvade mitt på motivet.

På Galleri Engström kan man se figursågade silhuetter som monterats på målningarna och liksom tvingar sig in i motivet. I en annan svit ser silhuetterna närmast ut att vara sågade ur stora målningar som sedan kasserats.

Wickströms motivvärld består ofta av det vardagliga och allmängiltiga. I målningarna finner vi landskap och arkitektoniska miljöer, i silhuetterna skönjer vi exempelvis stadsprofiler, fåglar, kameror och en barnsoldat. De olika sammanhangen förändrar drastiskt motivets betydelse: en vit silhuett av en pojksoldat, monterad på en målning av Anita Ekberg är förstås något helt annat än när samma silhuett är utskuren ur ett enormt blomstermotiv.
Det här är inte bara en lek med visuella tecken. Wickström har valt med största omsorg och för den som tittar länge finns gott om ”spår” som fungerar
sammanbindande. Ett spår är filmen, med tydliga referenser till skådespelare och filmkameror, liksom subtila kopplingar till enstaka filmer.
Referenserna sträcker sig också till modernismens och industrialismens formspråk, liksom till Wickströms eget konstnärskap.
Ändå så tror jag att den som bara letar efter verklig ”mening” missar något väsentligt. Wickströms omsorg innefattar också i högsta grad frågor som komposition och skala. Det är denna omsorg för det visuella som binder samman utställningen och det är också det visuella som bestämmer hur montagen skall se ut. Det blir tydligt i en liten modell där ett flygplan flyger ”genom” flera lager av kalejdoskopiskt monterade bilder. Här bildas suggestiva mönster som ibland gör det omöjligt att se vad bilden föreställer. Men det är inte heller alltid så viktigt. Wickström visar att det inte alltid är vad bilden föreställer som är dess mening. Det gör verken på en gång visuellt starka och svårgripbara.

Håkan Nilsson

DN, August 2004

Martin Wickström, 46, is an artist and decision-maker of art. The people of Stockholm have him to thank / blame for the monument of Wallenberg being where it is. If you want to see his own art this is a good weekend to do it.

Two flights of stairs down Martin Wickström opens the door to a windowless industrious space. On the opposite side of the wall the subway passes by and S:t Eriksgatan becomes S:t Eriksbron. Down below, through the floor, pumps the rhythms of the body builders in the gym, the neighbor another flight of stairs down toward the idyllic buildings of Atlasområdet.

From Martin Wickström’s art you can expect a play with models, gadgets and objects put together in a technically inventive manner that can strike the viewer with a vague feeling of boy’s room and a scent of folkhemmet. The first peek into the studio doesn’t disappoint me. To step in is like visiting the workshop of a magician.

– Everybody is talking about the boy’s room thing, Martin Wickström says with a look of slight puzzlement.

In the left end of the studio is a toy ambulance of metal with a big propeller on its roof. In the other end, on a top shelf, is a left over art work from K98, the culture capital year. At that time it was put together with a relief of Winnie the Pooh, now it’s standing on its own – a beautifully figure sawn piece of wood that forms the word “death” in an appealing blue color. Some might think of the word “manly” about Martin Wickström’s world.

– I have to take that, I am a man. And I love building models, he says.

On top of tables and along the walls is the new exhibition of the artist, in a more or less finished state. The next day it is to be taken to veteran gallery owner Göran Engström’s premises on Karlaplan for saturday’s opening.

Martin Wickström is certain how to hang everything in the three rooms of the gallery, where he is at home since the late 80s.

– Sculptures in the entrance, regular square paintings in the middle and these farthest away, he says pointing toward reliefs or silhouettes painted with a floral pattern. If you look closely they appear to be figure sawn and have the contours of a bird, a reference to sir Alfred Hitchcock.

After his time as a project manager at the State’s Art Council and before the new career as an art consultant Martin Wickström is making a new exhibition in his own name. It is the first one in Stockholm for three years and is titled “Cinema Paradiso”, a salute to his own obsession with movies, especially his favorite by the same name by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore.

Here is not only Hitchcock but also a figure sawn sign with the word “Belmore”, the coffee shop that   forms the central point of the life of Travis, Robert de Niro’s wandering character in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”.

– But this image is the center.

Martin Wickström points to the not so inconspicuous cleavage, flesh tinted bosom against pink dress in a large painting of a 50s style lady with the look of a movie star. It stands beside some… portraits you might call them, of buildings from the same era, resembling the ones in Finspång where the artist grew up.

– The woman, the beautiful and wonderful, he says with a smile and explains that the image is based on the cover of a magazine. A photo of Anita Ekberg, incidentally from 1957, the birth year of the artist.

Everything is not nostalgia and geeky movie references, here is up to date danger as well, in the form of white painted reliefs which he has screwed onto the paintings and that occupy parts of the surfaces. Martin Wickström calls them “tattoos”. There is a boy who at first glance could be a child soldier. The urban landscape comes from a travel through Lebanon.

– I work rather freely from several ideas. Some things end up as I expect them. Others pull away and become something different, the entire intensive work with the exhibition is fluent, it is an adventure, it’s not programmatic, you can find distinct links. They are not waterproof, the can limp and be loose, and sometimes you don’t understand at all.

The subtle mechanisms of the art world are also limp and loose. After initially being one of the hot new art names, he suddenly found himself being not as renowned as others from the same generation, such as Max Book and Ernst Billgren.

– You think you have the final solution when you are 25 and studying at the Royal Institute of Art. But suddenly there are new people there who know better, you have to learn to live with that. There are artist who try to race, hunt that beam of light that constantly moves, I think it’s impossible.

During his six recently finished years as a project manager at the State’s Art Council he has not only brought forward fellow artists but also made controversial pieces like Kirsten Ortwed’s monument over Wallenberg happen.

– If I have the commission of a project manger it is because someone thinks I have a good knowledge and know my business. Then I have trust my own knowledge. It can’t be measured like the special competence of Kajsa Bergqvist that can be read in how many centimeters she has jumped. But when I feel that “this is a really great art work” I can’t back down. Even if I on an intellectual level can understand that some people will find the work weird.

– To give in to the doubt about how the piece will be received would be an error of duty. I have given them some incredible art. They will discover that one day.

You can stand up to that?
– Definitely. No doubt.

Clemens Poellinger,

SvD, August 2004