Torbjörn Limé is a professional visual artist since his first solo exhibition 1988 at Galleri Läderfabriken (The Leather Factory Gallery) in Malmö. He has a final degree in painting from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, which completed his 10 years of art studies. Painting is still today in focus for his studio work. He paints mainly with oil and water colour. Photography is a parallell part of his artistic research both in its own expression and as work material for his painting.
Larger thematic series are the outcome of his painting processes. What is in focus right now is
The Labour Suite, a grey-scale photo realistic painting project taking on issues of identity, class, work and nature in our post-industrial society. In relation to the visual language of these paintings the project also includes photography and objects. The underlying motif is his childhood in Trollhättan, earlier one of Sweden's largest industrial towns. The totally opposite theme is the Terrain Nébuleux (French for Nebulous Terrain) launched already in the early 1990s. It's a colour strong, organic, meditative, poetic and abstract world. Art historical references, ecology and theoretical reflections are blended with painterly philology, which result in optically intensified colour sensations in which warm-cold contrasts, rather than the light-dark contrasts, tease the visual conception. In the nebulous field, he wants to expose a synthetic form of nature.
Site, environment and context are influencing his choice of materials and expression which means that photography, moving images, objects and installation also can be considered. In the artist group Limé and Värelä he works together with Jukka Värelä with site-specific art in public spaces and land art.
Throughout his whole professional career as a visual artist he has worked with education and teaching at art schools and artistically oriented universities. He founded the artist run galleries The Pineapple in Malmö 1996, Sparwasser HQ in Berlin 2000 and was co-founder of Galleri ID:I in Stockholm 2001. For his work on developing the Swedish art scene, he was 2003 awarded the Dynamo Prize by the Art Grants Committee in Sweden. Several times during his career he has received working grants from the Government through the Art Grants Committee.
2019 he published his book Torbjörn Limé - selected paintings 1987-2018 which is covering his then
30-year anniversary as a professional visual artist. The book is focusing on his life-long special interest in painting. At the planning stage is a second book with the working title "Appendix" which will present his non-painting projects. It will include a wide range of works spanning over 4,5 decades of performance, installation, photography, video, animation, sound, relational art and a few public works. A third book concerning the painting project The Labour Suite is also planned.
Statement
With emphasis on colour, form, illusion and perception, I'm exploring the intersection between realism and abstraction for a form of critical realism which reaches beyond the direct imaging, finding its springboard in the expression of materiality. The central issues in my studio work, which initiates process and method with respect to composition and representation, are economic, ecological and social perspectives related to the individual and the environment.
Torbjörn Limé: Reflections on painting
My professional work in the arts can be divided into four different but closely related themes. A fifth theme runs parallel and continuously with these four, moving within an extended painterly field.
An interdisciplinary approach has been adopted in this field, which expands the components of painting - light, colour and shape - on a two dimensional surface, to transform a flat surface into pictorial space.
Right from the start, the landscape and nature in relation to an industrial reality became the focus of my creative work. I drew inspiration from Monet's later water lily paintings which presented an abstract alternative to my industrial childhood environment. The allure was not the nature motif as such, but the actual paint application, which could be discerned on a closer study of the surface of the paintings. The organic surface dispersed by a flickering network of colour patches formed its own earthly universe. The absence of set contours opened up the possibility for personal pursuit, with intuition and spontaneous inspiration as landmarks, which made way for inner perceptions and a freer painting approach.
In my first project, which was eventually given the work title Naturia, I painted abstract landscape pictures based on a feeling of finding oneself right in the middle of natural surroundings with no possibility of focusing on their vegetation. What interested me was the landscape painting as a historical construction linked to an environmental view of nature under the threat of humankind. The prerequisite was a romantic idea of the phenomena 'nature' which also gained influences from the post modern theories which came to Sweden in the mid '90s. Then there was both an affectionate relationship to the means of expression in painting, to the art, concurrent with a critical scrutiny of tools, their objectives and means.
In the early 1990s my painter's eye was lifted from an intrusive examination of nature's vegetation to visions of light and colour in the sky, with no traces of perspective. In the project Terrain Nébuleux a multifaceted painterly surface evolved, which gave the beholder different layers of understanding and opportunities to make personal interpretations determined by one's own personality. Art historical references, ecology and theoretical reflections were blended with painterly philology, which resulted in optically intensified colour sensations in which warm-cold contrasts, rather than the light-dark contrasts, teased the visual conception. In the nebulous field, I wanted to expose a synthetic form of nature.
The existential content continued to be my main theme, even though my painterly expression changed in the early 2000s from polychrome to a colourless grey scale closely related to the grey scale card in photography. The project Topografische Realitäten (Topographic reality) shifted my interest from synthetic abstractions to an artistic process which focused on beingness and touched on the social and economic structures of the time. The methodic image work, which was based on photographic originals, was imbued with a documentary presence which denoted vanishing points along a human and non-linear time axle. It took up the issue of the vulnerability of nature and of the individual's relationship to the surrounding society.
In my relatively newly launched project Arbetarsviten (Labourer suite) and in its offshoot Jordmålningar (Earth paintings), issues on identity, class, work and nature in a post industrial context have emerged and become thematic key concepts. The underlying motif is my childhood in Trollhättan, earlier one of Sweden's largest industrial towns. I still have vivid memories of the picture of the German Ruhr region in my junior school geography book. The dense smoke rising from the chimneys in a grey scale illustrated the West German industrial boom of the '50s and '60s. The content is well in keeping with my own immediate environment even if the scale of industry can hardly be compared.
The lingering atmosphere of past history which makes its presence felt in a post industrial present and in the individual is a theme I find urgent to explore. My objective is to find out how a place creates an identity, what shapes childhood development, and what constitutes memory? An important factor is about how I handle and relate to subjective recollections and the photographic reminiscences in relation to the painterly project's language. How dualism between the paintings' iconographics and society's transformation, in which an industrial epoch has been volatized, can be conveyed. This epoch is strongly linked to Sweden's technological advances, whose impact is firmly anchored in my childhood environment and family.
With emphasis on colour, form, illusion and perception, I want to explore the intersection between realism and abstraction for a form of critical realism which reaches beyond the direct imaging, finding its springboard in the expression of materiality. The central issues in my current studio work, which initiates process and method with respect to composition and representation, are economic, ecological and social perspectives related to the individual and environment.