Poster / Glossy Paper

Swedish artist Per Wizén (born 1966) is one of the few artists in the contemporary European art world to use “collage” as the main creative language and continue to explore image reproduction and narrative deconstruction. A graduate of the Malmö Art Academy, he has been active in Nordic and European contemporary art exhibitions for many years. His works have been exhibited in Undercurrents, a major solo exhibition at the Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden, and in the Cecilia Hillström Gallery in Stockholm.

Wizén's approach is rigorous and poetic. He extracts fragments from art history drawings, fairytale illustrations, classic comics, and cinematic images, and then reconstructs new scenes with hand-crafted collages (analogue collage). At first glance, these images are delicate and harmonious, but in fact they are composed of countless tiny visual fragments, with complex temporal levels and psychological implications. In particular, he prefers the theme of natural images such as forests, trees, fog and shadows, which are no longer just backgrounds in his works, but carriers of emotions and narratives, symbolizing the space of the subconscious and the habitat of memory.

In Blue Hunt (2022), Wizén continues his obsession with forest landscapes. With a width of three meters, this piece is composed of hundreds of blues image fragments. It seems to be a quiet woodland, but it implies deep uneasiness and expectations. The title "Hunt" hints at the "hunting" scene, but the hunters and prey are not visible on the screen, leaving only the forest itself - this "absent narrative" lets the viewer's eyes wander between light and shadow and branches, as if waiting for something to happen. The cool blue color adds loneliness and poetry to the picture, making the entire space between reality and dreams.

Wizén's work has often been criticized as an “illusion under the fabric of reason.” Through meticulous collage technology and extremely restrained tones, the image is visually restored to almost paint-like continuity, while retaining the fragmentation and sense of time of the collage. This contradictory tension gives his work both classical aesthetic depth and psychological contemporary thinking - between familiarity and strangeness, between memory and dreams, Wizén allows viewers to re-examine the boundaries between “seeing” and “reality.”

Since the 2000s, Per Wizén's work has been exhibited in important institutions in Sweden and Europe. His important solo exhibitions include "Undercurrents" (2022), held simultaneously at the Moderna Museet Malmö and the Cecilia Hillström Gallery in Stockholm; "Subterranean" (2016) and "Trespassers" (2019), both exhibited in the same gallery; and the early retrospective exhibition "Works 1998–2008", held at the Malmö Museum of Art. He has also exhibited at the Skissernas Museum (Swedish Museum of Drawing and Sketching), Work in Process, publicly demonstrating his complex collage making process.

Wizén's work has participated in several international joint exhibitions, such as Power & Paint (2024–2025) in Finland, Notions of Time (2022–2023), and Diversity United – Contemporary European Art on tour in Europe. His work has been collected by several institutions, including the Moderna Museet, the Malmö Museum, the Borås Museum, the Public Art Agency Sweden, and international collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art (USA).

In terms of artistic achievements, he has received several Swedish art awards and funds, such as the Barbro & Holger Bäckström Art Prize in 2008, the Edstrandska Stiftelsen Grant in 2006, and the Ellen Trotzig and Aase & Richard Björklund Fund Scholarships, which fully affirm his position in the field of contemporary art in Sweden.