When Carl Fredrik Hill died in 1911 he was almost completely unknown. Yet, some forty years later, when Sweden’s National Museum organised a retrospective to mark the centenary of his birth, the catalogue described him as “one of our greatest.” In the meantime, his work had left an indelible mark on modern art. Has any other Swedish artist had such an impact on posterity? Twentieth century art and poetry in Sweden would certainly not be the same without him.
Thus, when Mamma Andersson and Tal R join forces in About Hill at Malmö Art Museum, they place themselves in a long line of artists fixated on the unrestrained and sometimes unsettling imagery of Hill’s late period, when the estranged landscape painter was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Confined to his family home in Lund from the 1880s onwards, Hill produced thousands upon thousands of highly original drawings whose psychosexual imagery predate modernism by decades.
About Hill is also a sequel to Andersson and R’s two celebrated exhibitions at Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm and Bo Bjerggaard in Copenhagen in 2016. At the time, I found Andersson’s pernickety style almost a little too revealing next to her free-spirited Danish colleague. Why can’t Sweden have a Tal R or an Ida Ekblad? Or at least a Bjarne Melgaard? I found Swedish art during the early 2000s to be exceptionally dull and colourless.
Today, a new (less constricted) spirit in painting has been on the rise for some time, but Swedish art institutions have yet to catch up. They often require some overanxious theory or gimmick to defend the ‘scandalous’ turn to tradition that a contemporary painting show represents. As the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has stressed, a gimmick is a device that simultaneously works too little (a shortcut) and too hard (to capture our attention). This is exactly what is at play in Malmö, where Hill is used both to draw attention to a collaboration between two celebrated artists who don’t really have that much in common, and as a shortcut for Anderson and R to produce a binge of more or less Hill-esque figuration.
The bulk of the show consists of an impressive variety of works by the contemporary duo: from monumental canvases to intimate drawings. R’s vertical panorama of a rider falling off his horse and into a waterfall is an extravagant punch in the gut. Andersson’s painting of a giant child slumbering on a green hill is a frail song about the fears and anxieties of the present. If I used to prefer his rampant style to her austerity, I sometimes felt the opposite here. When his work felt muddled and garish, I was drawn to her quiet melancholy. Then, I frowned at her pretty picture of a vase with a Hill motif. Art as interior décor. Neither funny, nor very imaginative.
Where Andersson’s work appears programmatically void of a style, R’s manner is quite reminiscent of Hill’s: both are outstanding draughtsmen who blend a refined sense for the decorative with a cheeky iconoclasm. Hill signed his work “maximus pictor” (greatest among painters) and his ideas included drawing a sea of ejaculating penises. Schizophrenia or humour? R mixes exquisite materials (tin foil on paper) with paintings that most closely resemble aborted foetuses. He just doesn’t give a f*.
Around Hill is a fun show that struggles to make a lasting impression. Its semi-coherent menagerie of distorted bodies and melodramatic image-hooks echoes how streaming services exploit our desire for ever new versions of the same. Here, Ngai’s point that a gimmick can be turned on itself in a critical manoeuvre is reduced to a matter of simple identification. R is at his best in pared-down works where he reduces painting to its raw basic elements. Andersson, on the contrary, is better when she embraces her penchant for visual hits, creating melancholic pop songs in oil on canvas.
In the final gallery, around seventy of Hill’s drawings were displayed in vitrines and on the walls – an ill-favoured curatorial move which turns the original into a replica of the copy. Yet, Hill remains Hill. Crude sketches of raging animals are paired with feverish visions of naked women and intricate line drawing of classical interiors. There is a striking sense of danger, of an artist at war with himself and his surroundings. We might fancy ourselves as outsiders, but most of us belong to the same establishment that shunned Hill. The most forgiving aspect of this show is the brazenness of its vanity.
