Kent Iwemyr: STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF MAN

Kent Iwemyr crafts poetic, pictorial ballads. Intimate tableaus rendered with raw brushstrokes in acrylic on linen, sparse and open compositions sing songs about his local community in the small post-industrial town of Hallstahammar in rural Sweden, where he was born in 1944 and still lives and works.

Strange Are the Ways of Man is a microcosm where folklore, village talk, dreams and nature converge in imaginative tales. A satirical and humorous stream flows through the idiosyncratic motifs. We observe the everyday banalities of Hallstahammar play out among a motley cast of characters – a local brawler attempts to become a professional boxer, German tourists go moose viewing, teenagers swim and skate on the local lake. However, far from idyllic, Iwemyr’s naïvistic painterly treatment of his subject matter imbues the quaint with the uncanny; small, stick-like figures stare out at us with needle-sharp eyes in front of the stark backdrops of winter forests and humble, almost-empty interiors.

Devoid of sentimentality and always open to the dark undertow of the human condition, 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. The 18 new paintings are existential mirrors that place the viewer in the shotgun seat next to the narrator, in medias res.

Kilde: V1 Gallery