Gerhard Nordström

The artist Gerhard Nordström is famous for his painting series "Summer 1970 - excursion in the green" and for his sought-after landscape paintings, inspired by Claude Monet's gardens in the French village of Giverny. Gerhard Nordström made several study trips there. "The paintings developed over three months in Maglehem in the eastern part of Skåne, where the artist spent the summer with his family. The joyous work of capturing the greenery in all its colors and forms could not erase the images of the war and its victims that filled the newspapers. These memories pressed on and finally took physical form, in the tall grass and in the shadows under the trees.” From a review from the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, 2012 "Few can capture the ever-changing nature like Gerhard Nordström. The tones are tuned to the seasons, weather and the rhythm of the day. Although he has just turned ninety years old, he still paints as if it were the first time he really paid attention to the surrounding nature. The experience is there, of course, but the attention is undiminished. It doesn't matter that many of the motifs are familiar. The gaze has the same sharpness, the brush the same willingness to reproduce the roughness of the bark, or the high summer green of the foliage. Nevertheless, it is the nearest-enacted painter's joy that decides. Although he is a master at recreating the presence of a place, he never fully completes the illusion. At closer range, the oil paint takes over, creamy fat or crunchy roughness. Always saturated with pigment and luster. Something reminiscent of the feeling of standing in front of an artist like Claude Monet, and seeing on the spot what he accomplished beyond the picturesque reproductions of the postcards. Close to the canvas - whether it shows the water lilies in Giverny in France or Häckebergasjön in Scania - the forms dissolve in a contrasting play of brushstrokes and shades." From a review published in the Swedish daily newspaper Ystads Allehanda 2015