V1 Gallery presents
For the Geniuses of Art There Are No Limits
A solo exhibition by Kent Iwemyr
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY JUNE 7. 2024. TIME: 16.00 - 21.00
EXHIBITION PERIOD: JUNE 8 – AUGUST 10. 2024.
PLEASE NOTE THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSED FOR SUMMER HOLIDAYS JULY 8 – JULY 30. 2024
V1 Gallery is pleased to present For the Geniuses of Art There Are No Limits a solo exhibition by Kent Iwemyr. Kent Iwemyr crafts poetic, pictorial ballads and intimate tableaus rendered with purposeful brushstrokes in acrylic on linen. His intuitive and open compositions sing songs about Iwemyr’s observations and contemplations and are frequently set in his local community, located in the small post-industrial town of Hallstahammar in rural Sweden.
For the Geniuses of Art There Are No Limits is a microcosm where folklore, village talk, tall tales, dreams and nature converge in imaginative stories. An empathetic and humorous stream flows through the idiosyncratic motifs. A mysterious creature, a mixture of Greta Thunberg and a nymph, emerges from the forest riding a moose in the moonlight. A priest in his underwear, violin in hand, surfs the rooftop of a car through a rural landscape, a small white wooden church in the background. An organist plays a large organ in the lush marshes at dusk, and one senses the eerie soundscape in the rhythm of the painting. Three artists share a brandy on a cold winter’s morning in anticipation of their coming journey. A gentle fox rests in a moonlit pine forest covered by a blanket with a berry pattern in an homage to the artist and writer Ernst Billgren.
Two men in hats and blue coats carry a large painting of a flower bouquet towards a small white house – or is it a white cube? Or a chapel? Or all three? A woman, clad in sombre tones, opens a heavy door to the white building while, in the background, a couple bathes naked near a small boat in a lake, the landscape distinctly Swedish. All this unfolds in the work The Last Painting?, 120 x 140 cm, 2024. There is something strange and uncanny about the procession. Are we witnessing both a funeral and a celebration? Is the painting or painter being canonized? Locked away? So many questions emerge from the tableau, and this vibrating ambiguity is precisely one of the great features of Iwemyr’s paintings.
Iwemyr’s work contains multitudes. It channels the magic in the mundane, champions the outsider with empathy and makes space for comedy and tragedy to coexist. His paintings are fragile and punk and are often on the verge of a beautiful collapse. Iwemyr’s paintings sneak up on you. They sneak up on you like a country song that you weren’t supposed to remember but find yourself singing. The 19 new paintings are existential mirrors. They are wonderful curious meditations on the human condition.
Kent Iwemyr was born in 1944, Hallstahammar, Sweden, where he still lives and works. He made his debut with an exhibition at Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Västerås, Sweden in 1992. He was then 48 years old and had mostly been working as an art teacher following his studies at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and a stint as an abstract painter. He returned to the imagery he engaged with as a young man and set out to tell the stories of the people and events close to him. Since then, he has exhibited regularly both in Sweden and internationally. Iwemyr has, among other things, been called “A strange bird in contemporary art” and “A Swedish rural Chagall”.
Recent exhibitions include Den Blå Ryttaren / The Blue Rider, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden, 2023, Minimalism-Maximalism-Mechanissmmm Act 1–Act 2, curated by Jacob Fabricius, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea and Aarhus Kunsthal, Aarhus Denmark, 2022, Strange Are the Ways of Man, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2021, New Masterpieces Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden, 2020, Strange Bird, Ebelingmuseet, Sweden 2020, The Red House In The Woods, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, USA, 2018, Not That Dammed Easy!, Galerie Claire Fontaine, Luxembourg, 2017, For the Geniuses Of Art There Are No Limits is Iwemyr’s third solo exhibition with V1 Gallery.
