Andreas Glad | Wipe Your Feet On My Dreams
We are pleased to present Andreas Glad's first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wipe Your Feet On My Dreams, following his debut at Market Art Fair in 2021.
The exhibition features a new suite of paintings that are closely linked to Glad's hometown Malmö and to the Scanian landscape. Drawing on traditional landscape painting, Glad creates motifs based on places in his own everyday life. The inspiration for the project was evoked by the experience of the extremely hot and dry summer of 2018, where days and weeks succeeded each other in a déjà vu-like state. An initial idea that has been present throughout the process, is that the paintings in the exhibition unfold in various places and times of day during the course of a single day, with Sunflowers (The Day is Done) acting as a natural closing scene.
Without actually depicting the consequences of the 2018 heat wave, Glad still manages to capture a sense of gravity. The title work features a small-scale model made from simple materials and situated in a gravel pit. The model is based on a community garden lot on Rosengårdsfältet in Malmö, a green oasis in the suburban area. Two of the paintings, Under the Sun and In the Shade, show people passing the time in the heat in different ways. Groups of people sunbathing under the bright sky or seeking shelter in the shade, seemingly unconcerned by what is going on around them.
Andreas Glad's documentary portrayal of semi-urban environments and deserted landscapes creates an ambiguous sense of both recognition and alienation. Traces of human activity are everywhere, but humans themselves are generally absent. In contrast, it is the sometimes domesticated and sometimes untamed nature that is given voice in Glad's paintings. The paintings I've Been Here Before and I Will Come Here Again depict the remains of an enormous tree house which is almost completely overgrown with vegetation. The scenery does not represent an archetype of Scanian nature but does rather resemble a rainforest with the bright sun bursting through the greenery.
The exhibition includes several familiar motifs that are known from previous paintings and are recurrent subjects in Glad's work. The tree house, the community garden, and the bee hives. They are all examples of a kind of temporary architecture, rudimentary constructions, and bearers of a DIY tradition. As such, they can be said to represent a different form of civilization than the hyper-technological and well-engineered society we live in which often shapes human self-concept.
Andreas Glad (b. 1976 in Linköping) lives and works in Malmö. He graduated from Bergen Academy of Art with a Master’s degree in 2007 and received his BFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2005. Previous solo exhibitions include Galleri Ping-Pong, Malmö, Galleri LNM, Oslo, Myymälä2, Helsinki and Galleri Thomas Wallner, Simris. His work has also been exhibited at Market Art Fair, Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Ljungbergmuseet, Ljungby, Konstakademien, Stockholm, Linköpings Konsthall, and Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm. Glad is represented in the collections of Malmö Konstmuseum, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Public Art Agency Sweden, Swedish Association for Art (SAK), and Region Skåne, among others.
