Rolf Hanson
a STILL LIFE

Rolf Hanson is hardly an unknown on the contemporary Swedish art scene. His paintings are almost iconically recognisable. The works that Rolf Hanson is now showing at Galleri Hedenius, however, have a different timbre compared to the paintings we usually associate him with.

 If we were to categorise them, they could mostly be regarded as a kind of still lifes, but not in the usual Central-European sense based on Renaissance tradition of painting, where everyday objects are endowed with religious and symbolic meanings. Instead, these recent works have a degree of abstraction that evokes Modernist still lifes, where the focus is on formal and coloristic experiments.  Hanson’s still lifes reveal a kinship with Giorgio Morandi’s late pieces, where architectonic elements and landscapes interfere mutually in a singularly complex way.

In these new pieces, the Nordic cultural settings and clear freshness that often appears in his earlier paintings are conspicuously absent. On the contrary, the scenery in the background resembles a desert, where the sky evokes the drama that can arise in connection with a thunderstorm. In the midst of this arid landscape, an urban structure towers in the form of seemingly flat colour fields which together can suggest skyscrapers, like a dense, constructed island. The architectonic style contrasts with the intense colourism that sometimes resembles imaginary visions, similar to the exotism that has been integral to the artistic curiosity surrounding foreign environments since the dawn of colonialism.

-Bo Nilsson, September 2025

The exhibition runs 23/10 - 22/11 - 2025