ArtistSwedish
Lars Tunebo
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An elephant balances on a tightrope between Manhattan skyscrapers. A giraffe peers through the window of a London bus. A polar bear surfs a wave off Bondi Beach. Lars Tunebo's art takes wild animals out of the savannah and drops them, in vivid colour, into the most improbable urban settings imaginable. The results are funny, surreal, and weirdly plausible, carried by a visual technique that blends photographic realism with painterly intervention.
Lars Tunebo was born in 1962 in Lysekil, a fishing town on Sweden's west coast, and now lives and works in Gothenburg. He is entirely self-taught, having worked as a full-time creative artist for over thirty years. His primary medium is photo-montage, digitally compositing photographs of animals into cityscapes and landmarks, then enhancing each print by hand with transparent colours and individual effects. The layering of digital precision with manual paintwork gives his pieces a luminous quality that distinguishes them from purely digital art.
Tunebo's subjects are almost always animals, and the humour lies in the cognitive dissonance between creature and context. A bright pink flamingo on a Venetian canal. A British bulldog in evening dress. An elephant performing yoga in Central Park. The scenarios are absurd, but the execution is meticulous, lighting, shadows, scale, and perspective are carefully matched so that the animals appear genuinely present in their borrowed landscapes.
This accessible, joy-inducing formula has found a broad international audience. Tunebo's work has been exhibited from Los Angeles and Monaco to Moscow, Dubai, Copenhagen, Brussels, Stockholm, and Marbella. His art appears in galleries across Europe, including Galleri Mats Bergman and Ronen Art Gallery, and has built a following among collectors who respond to its combination of technical skill and irrepressible wit.
On the Nordic auction market, Tunebo's work appears primarily at Gomér & Andersson Jönköping, which handles the majority of his 210 lots on Auctionist, followed by Göteborgs Auktionsverk and Stockholms Auktionsverk. His giclée prints and pigment prints typically sell between 4,000 and 7,500 SEK, with original mixed-media works commanding similar prices. The market reflects steady demand for accessible contemporary art with immediate visual appeal.