Love Lundell

Love Lundell’s artistic practice is comprised of collaged paintings, drawings, and prints. Dreamlike, mystical, and surreal, yet also anchored in the everyday, his evocative scenes draw the viewer in, while hold them back simultaneously. Employing a collage technique across various media, Lundell intuitively brings together images derived from various sources, which are recontextualised to reflect a hallucinatory inner reality. He draws from his personal childhood memories, dreams, books, online sources, amongst many others.

Changes in the artist's ongoing explorations and resulting composition have been noticeable over the years, tracing back to his earliest, detail-dense, works. An notable shift occured in 2016, during an artist residency (Sommer.Frische.Kunst) in Bad Gastein, Austria, which resulted into the 2017, deeply symbolic Delta series. Factually, withnessing the majesty of a breathtaking waterfall in the Austrian landscape led to an engagement with the sublime and the tradition of Romantic landscape painting. 

A subsequent important series, Orfeus Källare (2022), emerged as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the related two-year period of isolation. Lundell initally created the fictional Hotel Elefanten, which lead to the imaginary re-opening of Orfeus Källare, a long-shut, foggy, crowded bar, formerly in the heart of Stockholm. It would become populated with motifs depicting fictional people, who inhabit this long-forgotten space as a refuge. Composed of diffused snippets of images, figures could be seen as fragmented reflections of our contemporary society. 

Lundell’s new series of paintings, OMEN (2024), marks a conscious departure from his previous, highly figurative style. An emphasis is now placed on materiality and interior details - motifs that do not carry a specific weight for the artist, which Lundell refers to as ‘artistic intertextuality’. No clear narratives unveil, while hints prevail. Instead, the artist joints fragments from different sources – for example; a piece from a 1975 shampoo advert meets a 1999 Ikea catalogue, or details from an Egon Schiele painting are found next to illustrations from a 1976 French children's cook book – all issued from the artist’s vast and widely varied image bank. Through overlapping of disjointed images, a sense that everything that seems to have a certain meaning becomes simultaneously meaningless is felt and ties in to the artist’s chosen exhibition title.

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Love Lundell  (b. 1981) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. After graduating from the Trondheim Art Academy, Norway, in 2010, he has developed a distinctive style, which blends seriousness and humor, fantasy and reality. In 2023, Lundell had his first solo museum exhibition in Finland, at Turku Art Museum, titled On Demon Wings. His work is featured in the permanent collections of Turku Art Museum, Finland; Stockholm Region, Sweden; The Public Art Agency (Statens Konstråd), Sweden; Katrineholm Municipality, Sweden; The Swedish Embassy in Cuba.

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