Jockum Nordström: The Anchor Hits the Sand

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Jockum Nordström (b. 1963) at the gallery’s London location. The exhibition will feature a new immersive environment that plays with light, shadow, and movement, as well as a range of new collages and works on paper.

Expanding on the characteristic motifs and imaginative spirit that have come to define the artist’s broader oeuvre, Nordström’s light and shadow environments  employ a cast of objects within a fantastical and psychologically charged environment that is at once vaguely familiar, evocative, and meditative. They are encountered by the viewer through a veil composed of semitransparent paper (in fact, the same paper used to create his collages); behind which cutouts of buildings, trees, and animal and human forms—recurring motifs in the artist’s work—are suspended between the ceiling and floor by rotating wire mobiles that are illuminated by color wheels, animating the surface of the paper in a whimsical play of light and shadow. The sound element, a “collaged” musical composition of found and new sounds, recorded in collaboration with the music producer Rudolf Nordström, the artist’s son, lends another dramatic dimension to the overall work. Taken together, the result is “part fantasy, part dream, and entirely analog. It’s a work out of time or place.”¹

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¹ Andrea Andersson, “Four Questions for the Curator: Andrea Andersson on Jockum Nordström: Why Is Everything a Rag,” davidzwirner.com (May 2018), accessed online.

Image: Jockum Nordström, Farväl/ Farewell, 2019 (detail)