Krister Follin. Iron Sign

19 June - 26 September

Krister Follin. Iron Sign
Sand painting

Ystad Art Museum is very pleased to present a major retrospective exhibition of Krister Follin (1936-2004). Follin was a visual artist, graphic designer, illustrator and writer. The exhibition Järtecken presents a series of furrows in Follin's multifaceted artistic career, from meticulously executed drawings to experimental painting with sand, glue and paint, as well as prints, publications and posters to exhibitions and jazz concerts. The works in the exhibition were created between 1963 and 1991. The title Järtecken, which according to the Swedish Academy Dictionary means "signs by which one can recognize something, prove something," refers to Follin's idle pursuit of finding essence through reduction and the search to establish a rhythmic resonance through his works, year after year.

Throughout Follin's oeuvre are explorations of the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, between the symbolic and the actual. He developed his own language by creating his own signs, or compositional possibilities as he called them. These compositional possibilities were strongly influenced by Zen, music and calligraphy. Follin's work often touches on the arbitrary boundaries between writing and image and speaks of wanting to understand the world and the self. Several works in the exhibition feature almost stenographic forms that move across the picture surfaces. Thoughts also turn to sheet music, and both rhythm and musicality flow through the pages and canvases.

A larger suite of sand paintings created between 1981-88 is on view in the main hall. From drawing with pastels on Swedish and American industrial sandpaper sheets, Follin now used sand as material, form and pictorial content. He collected the sand along the southern coast of Skåne, from Klagshamn to Maglehem. He brushed his canvases with glue and then sprinkled the sand over them. When the sand paintings were exhibited at the Tomelilla Art Gallery in 1984, Follin said that with them he was "trying to cheat time, to get away from the clock, this artificial ticking. Our time is made up. But we have a natural rhythm, a pulse that is eternal. It's a matter of holding on to that eternal moment."

In the western room of the exhibition, we can listen to a playlist of music that appears in Follin's notebooks. On the walls are posters he designed for jazz concerts and exhibitions. The room also displays the publications Blues in F (Forlaget Sommersko, 1980), made in collaboration with journalist Leonard Malone, and Jim's Bar (1988), which consists of 36 drawings from the restaurant of the same name on Västergatan in Malmö, run by architect Lars Asklund (who went by the name Jim). The number of drawings is the same as the number of seats in the restaurant.

Krister Follin was born in 1936 in Stockholm. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen under Erik Clemmensen, at Beckmans in Stockholm, in Rome and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. From 1962-64 he studied with the American painter Harvey Cropper (1931-2012). In 1977 Krister Follin moved to Solgården outside Oxie with his then wife, the artist Gun Enbom (1939-2011). Since 1997 Follin worked and lived in Glemmingebro, where he died in 2004.

The exhibition is curated by Julia Björnberg, curator at Ystad Art Museum.