Beckers Art Award 2016

About

The 2016 Beckers Art Award winner, Tomas Lundgren (b. 1985) took his BFA in fine arts at the Art Academy in Malmö and his MFA at the Valand Academy in Göteborg. He was awarded Fredik Roos Scholarship in 2014 and was shown in connection with this at the Moderna Museet in Malmö. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Göteborgs Konsthall, Malmö Konsthall and the Gothenburg Museum of Art. He is represented in the collections at the Moderna Museet and Gothenburg Museum of Art.

Jury's Statement 
In Tomas Lundgren's artwork, we can always glimpse a reference image. He works almost exclusively with old photographs, portraits or pictures of people, which ended up in the archive or different types of collections. A person, a face lifted out of the past, as a model he twists and turns around. Selecting-principles are not controlled by any rules, he seeks no fixed ideal, no specific appearance, rather deviation, not how the person looks, but possibly how she can look.

The interest revolves around how painting has the possibility to create a constructed representation of something that the artist have a feeling about, a kind of empathetic attempt to an alternative interpretation. He willingly depicts the same subject, repeat the process when differences, small dislocation arises, as to test his memory and his capacity at every unique occasion. The repetition becomes a ritual for visualizing time and memory, fragments and collections. In the choice of making the paintings in black and white thoughts unsought go to photography. In these close cross-fertilization his images develop into a meditation over painting and photography's changeable possibilities and shortcomings in the interpretation of reality.

Tomas Lundgren is awarded Beckers Art Award 2016, because he is pushing the possibilities of painting in a innovative and exploratory, almost meditative way, because he manages to break free historical fragments from the forgotten flow of images, merge them to alternative possibilities, attract new life and create a painting that is characterized by a clear innovative will.

The exhibition in Färgfabriken, Lundgren have produced two new series of paintings. One of them is called Mirroring Part 1-4. The exhibition also features the series Variations from 2015.

Beckers Art Award has, since its establishment in 1987, been awarded to several of Sweden’s most innovative and exciting young artists, such as Dan Wolgers (1989), Jockum Nordström (1999), Linn Fernström (2000), and Nathalie Djurberg (2006). The selected artist receives 150,000 SEK, as well as a solo exhibition organized in collaboration with Färgfabriken. Since 2000, the selected artist’s works have been exhibited in a solo show at Färgfabriken.

The jury: Jenny Lindén Urnes, Mårten Castenfors och Magnus Jensner.