ABOUT

Imagine you walk through a landscape as if you were taking a stroll in nature. After some time your pace seem to change. Your steps become shorter and your eyes start to wander. For the first time in a very long time your senses seem to work together. Your nose with your eyes, with your ears. Yourwhole body, everything focus on the same thing, on the landscape you are in. You register all the details. Then you leave. You might step in to your car, on to your bike, on to the plane or on the boat which will take you back to your ordinary situation, your daily life.

What if you would try and recreate this ephemeral experience you just had of nature? Where would youbegin? For the artist Mats Lindh it begins with a slow processing of this memory. Memory does something to an experience. Some fragments disappear. Others are reinforced and exaggerated. Things shift around. After sometime, what is left might only be a smell or a sound – a sensation. Or as in case of Mats Lindh a combination of colours – a palette. The memory has been condensed into some very precise components and it is in these components where the whole experience of the landscape is hidden.

To unravel this memory Lindh uses water colour on a specific paper with a technique called monotype. His paper is very thin, with very strong fibers, like bible paper. When the paper is folded or wrinkled the fibers break and in the folds and cracks the colour is absorb differently from the surface. This creates lines. These lines start to articulate the details in a landscape. An intuitive dialog between the paper, colours and the artist is what creates the image. It is an interplay between a memory of a landscape, a palette of colours, a specific paper and the randomness of a printing process that makes Mats Lindh's images so close to nature itself. Almost as if you could smell the smells and hear the sounds.

Eduction:

1974-1976 Watercolour painting and the Anthroposophic colour system for Birgitta
Arkenback in Kungälv Sweden.
1976-1977 Oil painting and etching for Bertil Pettersson in Malmö Sweden
1978 Oil, tempera and acrylic painting at Gerlesborgsskolan in Gerlesborg Sweden
1978-1982 Etching for Olle Silversand in Västra Torup Sweden
1983-1984 Etching at Forum Art Academy in Malmö
1998-1999 Watercolour painting for professor Arne Isaksson

Group exhibitions (a selection):

1981 Vikingsberg, Helsingborg, Sweden
1982 Vikingsberg, Helsingborg, Sweden
1982 Cabo Frio International Biennial, Brazil
1983 Vikingsberg, Helsingborg, Sweden
1983 Rockford International Biennial, USA
1985 Vikingsberg, Helsingborg, Sweden
1996 Vikingsberg, Helsingborg, Sweden
2000 Vikingsberg, Helsingborg, Sweden
2009 Romele Konsthall Dörröd, Sweden
2009 The Nordic Watercolour Society
(The Nordic Watercolour Society 20th anniversary web exhibition)
2011 Kulturhuset Anders, Höör Sweden
2012 Hovdala slott, Hässleholm, Sweden
2014 Galeria Arte Algarve, Algarve Portugal