JIM THORELL
b. 1981, SwedenJim Thorell’s drawings and paintings are hybrids of wistful, fragmented worlds, neither spatially nor temporally definitive. His visual cosmos allows the viewer’s gaze to wander through fluid blocks of pastel colours and poetic compositions between figuration and imagination. His works may remind us of art historical predecessors from Symbolism and Surrealism, whilst uniting them with references to comic and tattoo culture into his own pictorial language.
The act of painting, like playing certain types of music, like days spent drifting through the city and bumping into friends, like letting one’s body collapse into beach-sand, has the capacity to melt the borders of the self. In Jim Thorell’s work, this melting is mobilized within a type of abstract picture wherein the painted mark collapses into a form of free-writing. Exceeding the boundaries of the autonomous composition, this body of work performs the oceanic. Its embodied collectivity spills over the borders of the typically socio-political, instead speaking from the resonant structure of being.
Jim Thorell, born 1981 in Stockholm, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the class of Daniel Richter. He lives and works in Stockholm.
Courtesy SETAREH
Works at SETAREH
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