JOHAN NOBELL
Battlefields
Bendixen contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Battlefields by the
Swedish artist Johan Nobell.
There are a lot of ways to depict the landscape; you can faithfully reproduce what you see with
photographic accuracy. You can also, like the impressionist did, transfer the impression nature makes on to the canvas or you can, like Johan Nobell does, create a fictitious and imaginative landscape and let these sceneries operate as metaphor for the civilization general condition.
Johan Nobell is considered to be one of Scandinavia’s most original painters, who convincingly have defended the genre of landscape painting in contemporary art history. Though Johan Nobell’s
paintings continues to challenge the traditional landscape genre he always maintain it narrative
tradition.
At the exhibition Battlefields, Johan Nobell demonstrates how well he masters to organize and control chaos of surreal, vivid forms. In a unique way Nobell illustrates, that it is in the space between the serious and playful, between the detail and a unified whole……that it’s simply in a controlled chaos that we find the greatest questions and answers.
Johan Nobell’s apocalyptic scenes are neither wholly abstract nor figurative, neither reality nor fantasy, but it’s exactly a surreal space where each attempt to grasp the slowly emerging narrative proves futile. The many details in the paintings acts as guerilla-troupes who provokes an ethical, political or universal riot within our (sub-) consciousness. Though the titles and landscapes often devoid of human presence – but with human like sceneries – Johan Nobell illustrates how he acknowledge and interpret human relations to nature in a contemporary society where natural and man-made worlds collide.
Johan Nobell (b.1963) graduated from Valand, Gothenburg University College of Art. His cooperated
with Kim Bendixen goes a long way back and his art has been exhibited all around the
world. Johan Nobell has have several solo-exhibitions in Los Angeles (Sandroni Rey), New York
(Pierogi 2000) Mexico City (Galeria OMR), and Stockholm (Andréhn-Schiptjenko).