Гуннар Норрман был шведским графиком. Единственное формальное образование в искусстве, которое получил Гуннар Норман, - это трехмесячный курс по печати в 1941 году. Он также активно изучал ботанику и обучался, чтобы стать концертным пианистом. Первая выставка работ Норрмана была в его родном городе Мальме в 1942 году.
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Nature as Poetry
For Gunnar Norrman, nature was simultaneously mysterious and familiar, vast and minute, knowable and unknowable. His black-and-white prints and drawings lovingly depict grand landscapes and individual plant life with the quiet restraint of soft or fine lines and subtle variations in tone. The Swedish artist, inspired by his natural surroundings in his home of Lomma in Skåne, Sweden, imbued his artwork with a sense of wonder and appreciation that stemmed from his own profound kinship with the natural world. An ardent draughtsman, Gunnar Norrman was also a skilled musician who studied botany and genetics—a combination of interests that can be clearly seen and felt in his artwork. Calm and delicate, his prints and drawings of manmade structures enveloped in natural environments “sing” with a quiet melancholy, suggesting the sorrowful tension between the two realms. Such tension is resolved in Norrman’s application of subtle tonal gradations, which glorifies the shared gentle dignity of man and nature and advocates for their peaceful, harmonious relationship. It is through exquisite attention to nature’s subtleties that Gunnar Norrman’s biological training reveals itself with a flourish. Precise depictions of the veins, stems, and buds of plant life such as scraggly branches, reeds, or a cluster of flowers showcase all the beauty that is visible in nature, including the underappreciated and the overlooked. Though Norrman’s individual plant forms are drawn with biological accuracy, his landscapes and seascapes appear as enchantingly ambiguous locales. The hazy, blurred details of these landscapes convey not only the vast distance and scale of these natural lands, but especially our inability to completely comprehend them. The atmospheric prints and drawings by Gunnar Norrman present nature as stoic, graceful spaces in which humans can humbly coexist. His intricately detailed drawings of plant life narrow our vision toward beautiful biological truths, while at the same time, his breathtakingly hazy landscapes expand our field of wonder for nature’s abundant mysteries.
— Jacqueline Belfield Gertner
Biography
Swedish artist Gunnar Norrman’s endeavors in art were complemented well by his pursuits of music and botany. He was a skilled draughstman, musician, and gardener. His delicate and subtle pencil and conté drawings and lithographs and drypoint etchings are like melodic compositions on the simple beauty of nature’s gifts. In 1979, he was awarded the Prince Eugen Medal by the King of Sweden for his outstanding illustrations found in Naturen I Våra Hjärtan, an anthology of poems. Greatly respected in his native Sweden, Norrman’s works were featured in the 1997 exhibition titled Modern Scandinavian Prints at the British Museum, London. He has also exhibited in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, England, France, Japan and Italy. His works are in the collections of the British Museum (London), the Nationalmuseum (Stockholm), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), among others. In 2003, a catalogue raisonné, Gunnar Norrman: The Complete Graphic Works, 1941-2001, was published by the Fitch-Febvrel Gallery in New York. Norrman died in 2005.
