We are pleased to present the artist’s latest work in Green Black Blue, a title that simply refers to the colour scale of this particular series, a stark contradiction to the technical complexity inherent in his work.
At a distance, Allgulander’s images appear to be classical landscape paintings. However, upon closer investigation, an intricately layered grid becomes visible, with imagery broken up into pixels and dots upon a base of printed colour, a process that creates a more sculptural painting in character. There is a fundamental criticism of civilization built into his work; the seemingly verdant close-ups of plants and gardens are not from nature but from greenhouse environments, a second-hand experience of nature which today is actually most people’s contact with nature. Allgulander has developed a method of painting that gives a visual expression to this message, be it a reflective water surface, as in Moby Dick where white dots create a bokeh-phenomenon of light and reflection, or in the painting Group Chat where thousands of empty speech bubbles form repetitive shadows creating a so-called digital impressionism. The human endeavor to organize and systematize shows itself in Allgulander’s methodology. The templates are often photographs and sketches edited together digitally to then be analogically printed and painted in a larger format on the canvas. A time-consuming method that questions the traditional romantic idea of what landscape painting is, highlighting our nonchalant relationship with nature and how we produce our foods.
Making his debut as an artist in 1994 at the Olle Olsson-Huset in Solna as a sculptor and installation artist, he worked with a variety of materials and techniques. Allgulander is, however, perhaps best known to the Swedish public for his limited editions of lithographs and silkscreens. A move to London in 2013 gave Allgulander the opportunity to develop his artistic expression in new directions. His work was discovered by an international audience, and with exhibitions and art fairs in Hong Kong, Basel, Miami, and New York, Allgulander is now fairly established internationally. The artist has also exhibited in his former hometown of London at The Royal Academy of the Arts and Saatchi Gallery, among others. Joakim Allgulander is today based in Perinaldo, a mountain village in northern Italy where the majority of the exhibited works are made. Major exhibitions and commissions in recent years include Right Here Right Now, Saatchi Gallery London (2021), Positions Art Fair, Berlin (2021), E/AB Fair, New York (2021), Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach (2020), Exile on East Street, Fiumano Clase, London (2020), Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London (2020), VOLTA, Basel (2019), Art Central, Hong Kong (2019) and Part 1 & 2 of a large commission for the Dorchester Hotel, London, curated by VISTO Images (2022-3).
Joakim Allgulander (b. 1965) was educated at Konstfack 1986-1989, Öland’s School of Painting 1985-86, and Uppsala University (Visby) 2002-2003.
