Lukas Göthman
Journey

07. - 30.09.2012

Stockholm artist Lukas Göthman’s Journey exhibition continues his project of many years, which demonstrates the importance of place and memory; who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going?

This stage of the journey is definitely a new departure. Göthman’s paintings leave behind land and sea, at least, in the way that we have traditionally been accustomed to see and encounter them, both in the landscape and in paintings depicting the landscape. Now, the colors come at us, and they come at us fast. Oppressive reds, lurid yellows and stinging greens.

On this occasion, we journey into a world, into its physical and mental imagery, where the coordinates tell us something special and strange. We venture into the distance, somewhere between the Earth and Mars. Where the things we meet are both barren and beautiful, familiar and unknown.

Göthman’s journey is an unequivocally personal one. He paints and writes himself into the story and out of it, returning again and again. He seeks ways and means of achieving desires and needs that we all recognize: the compulsion and the desire to be and to get away, to come closer and to move far off. Together and separate. Away from both ourselves and our environment, from both the storm warnings in our heads and the patterns put there by the structures of society.

In this exhibition Göthman carries on his series of essays written in the first person, in which the journey passes through fells and the Stockholm archipelago, not forgetting the hotel room in Berlin and the old, ruined house in Latvia. The exhibition coincides with the release of Göthman’s latest catalogue. Lukas Göthman’s (b. 1970) previous solo exhibition in Finland, Views from a Journey, was shown at Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary in winter 2010.

'I like routines. When day and night flow together, and the writing and the painting are getting intense, I think it is nice that some things stay put, so you can go back and see what has happened and what has changed. And then do it all over again. These physical stations of the journey stay put. And I really like them.'

Lukas Göthman