True art, according to Hermann Hesse in his educational novel Narziß und Goldmund (1930), arises when ideas and practice meet. The artist is thinker and craftsman in one person, Hesse recalled. Something similar is embodied by the Swedish artist Martin Wickström, who has become known, among other things, for his detailed, colorful photorealistic paintings and whimsical installations with ready-mades, in which things are taken out of context and transformed into existential question marks.

Martin Wickström combines landscape, cityscape, figuration and ready-made into a unique montage of paintings of cinematic proportion and enigmatic presence. Composed into scenes and moods with palpable depth, Wickström's scrapbook-like composition intertwines both collective memory and introspective biography, reminiscent of our uncertain past and nostalgic for histories that never were. It is through the artist's line of sight that new, lingering meaning is given - that, or none at all. Everything is skillfully combined in a balancing act between pop art and Swedish melancholy. Something seductive emerges from Wickström's process: in the colouring, highlights and brushwork. At times the shimmering sediment of the enchanting painting is shattered by sawed off and white-painted shapes, brutally screwed to the surface of the painting - a silhouette of a residential complex or a simple office chair. The sign occupies the foreground, though its information is greatly reduced. Meanwhile, these components demand to be anchored in a room other than the one depicted. The perspective shifts from signs to motifs, from mass culture to melancholy.