Artist: Alfred Boman
Exhibition title: Man Gave Names to All the Animals
Venue: Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: January 18 – March 2, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen
Alfred Boman’s artistic universe is wild, weird and filled with references to art history, where post-modernism and kitsch meet folklore and abstract surrealism in imaginative visions and in new perspectives.
With the exhibition “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”, Boman delve into an imaginary world that lies in the periphery of human consciousness, in a borderland between figuration and abstraction. Amorphous animal creatures occupy the image planes of the works and appear in caricature shapes and positions. The surfaces of the creatures’ bodies are paintings in them-selves with blistered and mixed color layers which, through Boman’s special technique of ap-plying acid to the wet color surface, create a harlequin pattern of blisters and bubbles.
As medieval interpretations of exotic animals, the imaginative creatures move on the image plane, and lead our thoughts to dreamy visions and the subconscious’s fabulating world. The fantasy animals appear on interlaced backgrounds alternately expressively and loosely painted and as monochrome surfaces in concrete forms. The loose and expressive is held firm by the rigorous forms that act as a staging for the wild and free motive.
The naively crafted motifs that blend with the perspectiveless background full of color create clear connections to the CoBRA movement’s naive, free and abstract surreal imagery. Just as there are links to the folkloristic in the portrayal of the fable animals and in the motifs of the paintings in general.
Alfred Boman’s works seem to grow out of a free thought that winds in and out of our real-ity and the subconscious dream world. There is a wild energy, almost a natural force, in the works that, with their organic imagery, seem to emanate from a life-spark, and a central vital-ity for everything that grows and exists. The condensed atmosphere of the image plane in its multitude of colors and layers, along with the curving and twisting animals dancing across the surface, becomes a picture of the life force that permeates our lives and the life that is in the world.
Alfred Boman (b.1981) lives and works in Stockholm. He graduated from HFBK Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2011 under Professor Tobias Rehberger. He has exhibited on eg. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Union Pacific, London, Carl Kostyal, Stockholm, Paramount Ranch, Los Angeles, Jo-han Berggren, Malmö, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm and others. Alfred Boman’s works can be seen in the collection of Nordic Contemporary Art Collection.
