MARTIN JACOBSON - The Garden is Open: Stockholm
It is with pleasure that we announce The Garden is Open, Martin Jacobson’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Dreams, myths and archetypical images all have in common that they are a door into a shared human consciousness, to experiences unbound by time, which connect humankind. Jacobson’s imagery can be read as an associative stream, generating from these shared experiences. The way in which modern humankind perceives itself and its existence in relation to nature is a dualistic world-view: human is ”another”, and our existence is alien and separated from what we define as natural. Myths, dreams and archetypical images all point to a, for humankind quintessential, transcendental longing; a desire to connect beyond the limits of the static self as limited by time. With a desire to deepen the understanding of how we perceive ourselves in relation to the world surrounding us, Jacobson delves deeper into this dichotomy, with his theatrical and saturated expression. How is it that a, to us previously unfamiliar, motif can awaken the feeling of recognition? How is it that certain visual phenomena awaken an instinctive, emotional reaction within us? It is this intuitive recognition that Jacobson seeks to portray in his works:
”For me, an encounter with art is defined by suddenly recognizing and remembering something previously unseen. When this occurs, art has a healing and uniting function. For me, my work in the studio is about reaching that experience: to suddenly stand in front of a picture, which appears more found than created by me, as if it was salvaged from a forgotten dream”
A concentrate of light- and color phenomena, cultural references and emotional reactions take place in a Fantasia-like world. In Jacobson’s sphere of motifs, the familiar takes on a new, strange shape just as the unfamiliar can give one the feeling of returning home. It’s a scenographic world where, as is the case on stage, fiction and reality meet and the double nature of beauty is allowed to be both seductive and frightening.
Martin Jacobson (b. 1978, Sweden) has since his graduation from Malmö Konsthögskola (Malmö, Sweden) in 2005 been exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in Scandinavia and internationally. Recent projects in 2019 include an extensive solo exhibition at Vandalorum (Värnamo, Sweden) and set design with monumentally scaled paintings for the Swedish artist Jonas Gardell’s stage show. His works have also been shown in the exhibition Martin Jacobson: Excursions at the Nordic Watercolour Museum, (Skärhamn, Sweden), Martin Jacobson: The Traveller’s Guide to the Other Side at La Conservera (Murcia, Spain) and in the exhibition The Collectors, curated by Elmgreen & Dragset in the Danish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Please, click here to hear Martin Jacobson introduce the exhibition in his own words.
