Martin Jacobson - Landscapes: Stockholm

We proudly present Martin Jacobson’s third exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko. 

Martin Jacobson’s most recent watercolours and oil paintings depict landscapes in an almost unreal range of colours. The starting point is images found on the ”scrap heap” of art history. Jacobson collects images at flea markets, second hand bookshops and on the internet. He looks for archetypical motifs and themes such as sunsets, moonlight, forests, water, skies and roads. Interpreting the originals is a way for Martin Jacobson to create an image that is both new and old, familiar and unknown. It is an attempt to repair the gap that time and space have created between the present time and the found image. In the works in the exhibition, Jacobson has more particularly focused on light and colour phenomena, which he feels correspond to the human condition. The sunset reminds us of time passing by and the dancing flecks of flight of the movement of all things.

Through painting, I want to give myself a push over the threshold. I try to create images, which I cannot imagine and can only appear through painting. I begin with an idea. After a while I must abandon the original idea and follow the will of the image. I feel I have succeeded when the image has taken me to a previously unknown place, without me getting lost on the way. Every image is a step of the way, a fragment of a larger image. The impetus for depiction is that it is a way for me to create a link between the depicted and myself. To give an abstract experience a concrete form.

- Martin Jacobson

Martin Jacobson (b. 1978) graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 2005. His solo exhibition Excursions at the Nordic Watercolour Museum in Skärhamn, Sweden, recently closed. His works have been shown in shows such as The Traveller’s Guide to the Other Side at La Conservera, Murcia, Spain, in the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009; in the exhibition The Collectors, curated by Elmgreen & Dragset, at the 17th Biennale of Sydney; in the exhibition The Beauty of Distance, curated by David Elliott, and Nordic Delight at the Institut Culturel Suèdois i Paris, curated by Sinziana Ravini.