Oskar Hult (b. 1986, Linköping; SE) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. The artist holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Works by the artist can be found in the permanent collection of Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Self-reflexive by nature, Hult’s works take representation as their subject, engaging with painting in the verbal sense as a continuous process of coming into being, or dissolving into abstraction. His canvasses often favour relatively small, panoramic formats and present us with enigmatic landscapes, or details of flowers. Some paintings hint at an interior environment from which the outside world is observed, or populate fields of colour with the faint outlines of a single house or hut.
In the past, Hult’s work drew parallels between the surface of a canvas and the top soil layer of the ground; painting provided a way to explore things that are swallowed up by time, as well as the toxic material we bury in order to maintain some sort of protective distance. The motifs then and now feel as if they have been uncovered from within the canvas – revealed through a process of brushwork closer to excavation than application.
Hult’s works maintain an interest in a sense of sequence or timeline, but more recent paintings feel transient like a flickering memory. The idea of space, and the journey across it, seems relevant to these paintings, as we encounter compositions that appear like scenes glimpsed from the window of a speeding train, or in a car’s rear-view mirror.
Fragmented in their construction, it is as if these images have been separated and pulled loose from an accumulation of impressions. The artist salvages individual visions from a pile that has been built up over a lifetime, where layers have started to decay and blur into one another while they wait.
Recent exhibitions include New Sounds at Anna Bohman Gallery (Stockholm; SE), Stuff It at Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm; SE), Mot Dagen at Galleri Arnstedt (Östra Karup; SE).