Lars Tunbjörk

Winter/Home

1.9 2007 – 9.12 2007

Stockholm

With stark documentary realism and bright colours, Lars Tunbjörk captures his own era. This is the first time his works are shown at Moderna Museet. The exhibition comprises two series of photographs: Home from the late 1990s, and his latest work, Winter, produced over the past year.

The photo series Winter portrays a season and a mental state. These pictures are from a country that appears familiar and yet strange. Pubs, desolate housing estates and pizzerias, places that look the same all over Sweden, whether they are in Borås or Stockholm. The cold, the dirty snow, and the artificial lighting create an atmosphere of isolation and alienation, but also of chance encounters and humour.

In Home, from the late 1990s, the terser aesthetics refer to memories from Lars Tunbjörk’s own childhood. It is not a documentation of suburbia or middle-class taste, but a personal exploration of childhood surroundings and the buildings and areas we call home.

Commenting on his work, Tunbjörk says; ”I want to be strictly documentary, but it’s all about me.”

Lars Tunbjörk started his career as a press photographer at Borås Tidning in the early 1970s. His breakthrough as an artist came in the early 1990s, with his photographic series Landet utom sig (Country Beside Itself). In photos from Skara Sommarland, Supermarkets and tourist sites, he portrays the last death-throes of the Swedish welfare state. Many of the pictures in the series have quickly come to be classic icons in Swedish photography.

Curator: Anna Tellgren

Home is a photographic exhibition produced by Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg.