Tegnerforbundet welcomes you to Mattias Bäcklin's first exhibition in Norway. Here Bäcklin presents drawings and sculptures. The artist finds inspiration in nature, in insects, birds and animals, as well as specific places that are of great importance to him. The sculptures are carved from old pine trees and show fragments of civilization. The evocative and time-consuming drawings have parallels to the Art Nouveau style with a graphic collage-like structure. They have a richness of detail, they are realistic and figurative with a slightly surreal touch. Bäcklin's pictorial universe thematizes and problematizes man's relationship to nature, but also the significance of nature for man. Man and nature have taken over each other's space, clarified with fragments of traces man has left behind in nature. Man threatens the biological diversity in nature, but from the artist's depictions he shows that nature finds new ways.
Significant for me is to explore connections and to let new opportunities be formed in the moment as a way to expand the present through the pen and reach a maximum sense of presence. Drawing me into new tracks and opening up new worlds and when this happens, it becomes important to process all the mutual relationships between what is depicted in order to find out what it is I am really doing. In this exhibition, I have started from events and places that have had an impact on the art I make. Taking nature into the playroom in order to spread the playroom into nature in the next moment and change the rules of the game to increase the possibilities of play is the theme for some large drawings I will show. The theme Play is present in several works where I pick up image fragments that represent our vision or our relationship to nature by, for example, John Bauer, David Caspar Friedrich and medieval books about hunting. I insert them into the rest of nature as lasting traces of humanity left behind. Nature decays and grows up again, but our ideas about it stand as motionless signs but fully possible to relocate. I will also show sculptures in wood and wax that will serve as a testimony to what is happening in the drawings and to some extent uncertain basis in general.
Mattias Bäcklin
Mattias Bäcklin (born in Uppsala in 1969) lives and works in Stockholm. Bäcklin has a degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Konstfack and he has studied aesthetics at Uppsala University. He has had several solo exhibitions in Sweden, including at Kungsbacka Art Gallery and SKF in Stockholm. He has also participated in a number of group exhibitions and has been shown at Charlottenborg, Ekebyhovslott and Vaasa Art Museum Finland. He has been purchased in a number of places and represented in the Statens kunstråd and Uppsala kunstmuseum.
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On the occasion of the exhibition, numermagasin.no conducted an interview with Mattias Bäcklin.
