OSKAR HULT
NEW SOUNDS
23 MARCH – 29 APRIL 2023
REVIEWED BY
OMKONST
28 MARCH 2023
KUNSTKRITIKK
4 APRIL 2023
KONSTEN.NET
6 APRIL 2023
Words vanish before they even take form. So, instead, remembrance. The landscapes that flicker by. What did I really see? It has been registered and stored. Impressions stacked inside the skull. In all the twists and turns of the brain, like residues. Trying to get a hold of the memories to see them in bright light, as they were, is impossible. Instead, they are given the possibility to appear. Or develop? One by one they go down in the basin with developer fluid. There! Something actually appears. It has been made visible.
Anna Bohman Gallery is pleased to present Oskar Hult’s third exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition consists of a series of new works where he continues to explore the possibilities of painting, as well as the possibilities of eternalizing the evasiveness of the present.
Color, light, shadows, and nuances travel over the canvas. The paintings seem to concretize and dissolve in the very second that the paint touches the canvas. Some paintings appear to be views from a window, whereas others are a close-up study of vegetation. Some works give a hint of an indoor space, while others show clear contours of houses and facades. The coloring is subdued, and the painterly language invites the viewer to reflection and recollection.
The artist has added small pieces of objects to some of the works: a toy train, a part of a fence, a smaller painting attached to the surface of a larger one. The world of Oskar Hult seems to be in between the past and the present, the foreground and the background, the stationary and the temporary. It is almost as if the artist refuses to be in a state of consistency. Has it to do with the conviction of the painting really being a verb? That is, that the painting actually does something with the artist himself and with us as the viewers of his works. That the interesting thing is the outcome of the impressions of experiencing his paintings? Oskar Hult leaves our perceptions in the state of in between, where everything meets, and the image appears.
The motifs are possibly already imbedded in the canvas, as if the image has always presided within the framework of the stretcher. Over the flat surface of the canvas, the brushes of Oskar Hult work like a camera obscura, slowly releasing the image from its background. The sensitive painterly language of the artist is not an emotional one, it is not coated with neither romance nor melancholy. Instead, the paintings seem very rational in their uncertainty. Oskar Hult paints the space in between.
OSKAR HULT, born 1986 in Linköping, currently lives and works in Stockholm. Oskar Hult holds a MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, 2017 and has also studied at the Academy of Arts in Vienna, 2015. Oskar Hult’s work has been shown at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Färgfabriken, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Malmö; The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm; Gallery Project Room, Helsinki; Tsukuba Art Museum, Tsukuba; Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg; Market Art Fair, Stockholm, among others. Oskar Hult was the recipient of Fredrik Roos Art Grant in 2017 and the TSUKUBA Art Museum Exhibition Grant in 2015, among others. Oskar Hult’s work is in the permanent collection of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Region Uppsala; Region Kalmar; Region Skåne; and Norrköping Municipality.
Installation images Mathias Johansson