TOMMY HILDING, oil on canvas, signed and dated 1997 verso.
60 x 81 cm.
Minor scratch with minor losses of colour.
Tommy Hilding shows an ongoing exhibition at Restaurant Sturehof at Stureplan in Stockholm, this summer.
Tommy Hilding is fond of 19th century landscape painting and is inspired by these, in many cases, directed views. In today's figurative painting he can see many parallels to what artists created more than a hundred years ago. The existence of light is important, as is the composition and balance.
"Characteristic of Tommy Hilding's art is his ability to skillfully merge many layers into a combined, complex unit. Different layers seem to overlap. After all, this intense oil painting may remind you of the transparency of the watercolor. Sometimes there is a distancing effect. At the same time, there is content in the images that keeps the viewer away from the subject itself. Therefore, the depicted world becomes no more realistic than a memory that gradually tears away, under the merciless influence of time.
In a similar way as once Ola Billgren, Dick Bengtsson or Max Book, Tommy Hilding connects to the visual rhetoric that postmodernism likes to refer to. "
Excerpt from a review in Svenska Dagbladet, Joanna Persman
“When I first saw Tommy Hilding's art at a gallery on Riddargatan in Stockholm sometime in the late 1990s, I was struck by the technically skilled painting, and what I perceived as a contradictory approach. I then perceived it as Hilding wanting to disrupt our aesthetic experience with various odd abstractions. It can be interesting with an artist who does not want to settle for craftsmanship, but who continues to challenge himself. Then I made connections with Ola Bilgren, Gerhard Richter and Richard Estes. It was fascinating to see how Hilding's scraping and blurring stretched the concepts of photo-realism. ”
Excerpt from a review from an exhibition at Galleri Magnus Karlsson Stockholm, konsten.net