ArtistSwedish
Martin Wickström
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Somewhere between a film still, a propaganda poster, and a traveller's notebook lies the pictorial territory Martin Wickström has occupied for four decades. Born in 1957 in Finspång, Sweden, Wickström trained at Gerlesborgsskolan in Stockholm from 1977 to 1981 before completing his studies at the Royal Institute of Art in the same city from 1982 to 1987. Those years shaped an artist who would spend the following decades constructing layered visual systems from oil paint, found photographs, and assembled objects.
Wickström's paintings operate like collisions - plastic buckets rendered with photorealistic precision sit alongside retro graphic text, reflective water surfaces, and architectural facades harvested from his travels across Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. A significant period in Vietnam provided what he has described as the central anchor of his pictorial imagination: the Perfume River in Hue, the palimpsest of American military signage still visible on crumbling walls, the weight of contested histories meeting the mundane texture of daily life. These paintings do not illustrate that experience so much as construct a new kind of memory from it.
His practice extends beyond flat canvas. The mixed-media object series, of which '3-D Micro Combiner III' is one example, places painted elements, printed imagery, and sculptural components inside framed assemblages. These works suggest the way memory itself gets organized - not as a clean archive but as a dense scrapbook where the personal and collective blur. Exhibitions such as 'Perfume River' at Mike Weiss Gallery in New York in 2014 and 'Paradiso (Out of the Red)' at Galerie Forsblom in Stockholm in 2018 have brought this sensibility to international audiences.
Wickström's retrospective 'Mount Florida' at Galerie Leu in Munich in 2022-2023 offered the most sustained overview of his career to date, tracing the development of his montage language across four decades. Earlier touring exhibitions including 'Anita and the Sea', shown at Skövde, Örebro, Norrtälje Konsthall, and Eskilstuna Art Museum in 2008, demonstrated his sustained presence in Swedish institutional life.
His work is held in public collections including Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Skövde Konstmuseum, Malmö Konstmuseum, and EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, as well as in the Fredrik Roos Nordic collection.
At Nordic auction, Wickström appears across houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Bukowskis, and Markus Auktioner, with a spread of 11 catalogued works ranging from giclée prints and sculptures to mixed-media pieces. His top recorded result at auction stands at 5,000 EUR for '3-D Micro Combiner III', underlining collector interest in his three-dimensional work alongside his paintings.