Jockum Nordström – Spring is in Winter

The title of the exhibition, Spring is in Winter, is borrowed from a work specially made for Tore A Jonasson's collection, a woven carpet whose motif is based on an abstraction of his early experiences of childhood football, including everything from different kinds of balls and washed-out shirts to the landscape of the clay pitch. The fantastic floss is woven by Märta Måås-Fjetterström after a watercolor by Nordström. Among the goodies are, in addition to the floss, also drawings, collages, paintings, an early mobile and an early large model of a football stadium where Nordström's familiar figures have taken their place on the playing field.

Jockum Nordström was born in 1963 and lives in Stockholm and Gotland. He was educated at Konstfack, University Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm from 1981 to 1985. Nordström has exhibited regularly since the early 1990s and had an international breakthrough in 2000. He is represented in the collections of, among others, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Skissernas Museum, Lund; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Galleri Magnus Karlsson

Spring is in Winter

“Heavy leather balls, tins, bottle tops, scuffed tennis balls, plastic balls, dry balls, sobbing-wet balls, ping-pong balls, damaged balls. Our word for ball was jota.” This is a quote from Jockum Nordström’s description of the process behind his work Spring is in Winter, a portrayal of boisterous childhood games involving various kinds of balls, which provided the poetic and hopeful title for this exhibition.

The work in question is a rug, made with an old tufting technique to achieve a dense shag. It was custom-made for the Tore A Jonasson collection. The rug design is based on a watercolour sketch by Nordström, who initially intended the motif to convey movement, a composition showing a match situation. But the final outcome was an abstract rendering of his earliest experiences of football, both the ball itself and memories of faded jerseys and gravel pitches. The material itself also influenced the motif to some extent, and the composition was adapted to the physical characteristics of the wool.

The choice of football as the theme for both the rug and this exhibition emanates from Nordström’s lifelong love for the sport. As a child, he was very active and often wore his football gear to school. Football was played everywhere, using anything for a ball. “Small gravel pitches were called rabbit hutches. I’ve spent hours, days and months in some of them,” he says. His first visit to the Söderstadion stadium with his dad Gert and his brothers was life-changing. Seeing a game up close, in the cold air and flowing spotlights together with an enthusiastic crowd made a lasting impression. His interest never waned, as is often the case with teenagers. On the contrary, from age 17 he played in the fourth division for a few years, alongside his studies at the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Eventually, after a seminal trip around Europe, he decided to focus on art.

Another highlight in the exhibition is one of his earliest works, The Arena, a model of a football stadium of the old kind, made during a summer in Norrland. It consists of old tins and sheet metal he found in his father-in-law’s shed and is riveted together and then given a coat of brightly-coloured glue paint. The work was commissioned for the exhibition Domarn Dömer (The Referee Decides), produced by the Riksidrottsmuseum in association with Riksutställningar – Swedish Exhibition Agency in 1992. As the title indicates, it was about the referee, one of the more inconspicuous but nonetheless important people on the football field.

The model was based on old English stadiums where only the grandstands and VIP boxes are covered. The old Söderstadion was also at the back of his mind, with the two tall bleachers along the sides, and lower ones at each end. The players were flat, like the figures in a vintage table-top ice hockey game, and were captured in rapid mid-motion. The frozen moment we see here is a dramatic goal scene, where the football has just bounced off the crossbar. Who is playing is irrelevant, although their jerseys might

suggest specific teams – the intention is to reflect old-style football. The pitch is lined with adverts for various products; far from today’s correct choice of sponsors, the hoarding of this old stadium is covered with ads for beer, alcohol and cigarettes, and the artist’s name also features at one end among the commercial messages.

The Arena was preceded by the mobile that is also shown in the exhibition. The figures, also cut out of tins and painted with glue paint, were made in the studio in between working on other projects and without any idea of what they would be for. In the end, Nordström had made a whole set of players, referee and ball, and mounted them in a structure of string and hangers from the dry-cleaners. Unlike the match in the stadium, which represents a higher league match with packed grandstands, the mobile players are happy amateurs.

Other works in the exhibition, several of which have never before been shown in public, include early drawings and paintings. One example is the painting Football Match, with packed grandstands. Could this be the same game that is going on in The Arena? However, the colour scheme here is more like the one Nordström uses today. In drawings from the second half of the 1990s, he portrays exciting matches with miraculous saves by goalies that either throw themselves recklessly or hover weightlessly above the ground. Here and there, shadow figures of erased players reveal that some positions have been adjusted. The game is set in various surroundings, sometimes with an audience, others in a traditional English working-class district with brick terraced houses, smoke coiling delicately from the chimneys, but there is always an elevated sense of drama in movements, poses and facial expressions.

In a vivid and rather unusual collage from 1998, black-and-white pictures of players cut out of daily papers and football magazines have been composed into action-packed scenes. The collage was a free composition but was published in Dagens Nyheter to illustrate a long article about the Swedish Premier League in the late 1990s. Shortly after, football scenes faded from Nordström’s imagery, only to crop up again ten years later, in response to a request from a printmaking studio in Copenhagen. He gave it some thought and then felt an urge to revisit the motif. More footballers were cut out in paper, resulting in the composition of a lithograph, Five-Nil (2009), followed a few years later by the solitary piece The Spider is Done Dancing, a large collage from 2012 with action-packed scenes where you can spot a couple of the figures from the lithograph, if you look closely.

Jockum Nordström is an artist of many talents. In addition to paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures, he also makes animations, illustrations and children’s books. Music is important to his artistic practice. He collaborates with other musicians and listens avidly to a wide range of genres. His multidisciplinary approach has often inspired cross-fertilisations, and he sees similarities in how both visual arts and music

achieve expression through rhythm, scale, and spaces or pauses, which are just as crucial in both art forms.

The material and inspiration are gathered from a variety of sources: newspapers, books, album covers or even old sketches that ended up among his cuttings. Drawing has been integral to his life since childhood, when he and his siblings would sit drawing together peacefully in concentration. As a child, he was fascinated by travel and exciting places. The world around him in the late 1960s is reflected in his art and his children’s books about Sailor and the dog Pekka. The evocative illustrations chronicle their everyday life, and a certain love for football occasionally seeps into the narrative through visits to the tobacconists to place bets.

Regardless of the story in his works or books, Jockum Nordström shares a uniquely personal imagery based on the world around him, be it a busy urban scene full of people, art and architecture of all kinds, or a peaceful forest with moss, leaves and pine needles, populated by mushrooms and animals. All his works are processed in multiple stages in a long process, where the road itself is the destination. In connection with a major exhibition at Liljevalchs a couple of years ago, he defined art as “a gigantic construct of the past, the present and the future, all rolled up into a huge ball”, a description that also encapsulates the theme of this exhibition at Konsthall 16. Welcome to a retrospective of the part of Jockum Nordström’s practices that has explored the theme of football for more than 35 years!

Ulrika Levén, curator

Our warmest thanks to all the collectors who generously lent their works to us for this exhibition. In addition to the artist, they include Måås-Fjetterström, Båstad; Riksidrottsmuseum, Stockholm; Michael Storåkers, Stockholm; Region Gotland, Visby; Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm; and Collection Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain.