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Dan makes a late Stockholm debut

Claes Britton | Feb 16, 2007 | 0 comments

It's funny how things in this life always seem to come in numbers. All of a sudden, one after another of my childhood and school buddies are rising from anonymity, storming into the limelight on a broad front. I've already written about my man Johan "The Doctor" Kling and his overwhelmingly celebrated late debut motion picture "Darling". Then it was time for two other homies, Tom Wolgers and Johan Kinde of eighties glamrockers Lustans Lakejer ("Lust's Lackeys") to make a surprise – to say the least – appearance at the Eurovision song contest (they got their asses kicked pretty badly, but anyway). Now the turn has come to an even older friend from an entirely different crew, my soul and former team mate Dan "Danne" Perrin, once the most gifted and natural half distance shooter that Swedish basketball has ever produced, now a quite brilliant artist whose career has been staggering for its first fifteen years but who has now finally got his breakthrough. On Saturday, Danne's first major Stockholm show opens at the respected Knäpper + Baumgarten gallery (Danne has shamefully stayed behind in Sweden's backside in Göteborg, where he attended the art academy in the nineties). There are several reasons why Danne has been confined to the background for so long, with nothing but infrequent small shows in obscure galleries. He's a mellow, somewhat shy and aloof character, far from the loud and pretentious salesmen often required in the art world today. Also, he's always stuck to oil painting which has now become trendy but which was plain obsolete through the first part of his career, when photography, video and installations ruled contemporary art supreme. He's stubborn too, and could devote years to excessive experimentations in oil techniques which in the end proved to lead into dead ends.

At Knäpper + Baumgarten, Danne shows eleven large acrylic oils, idyllic yet doomed and apocalyptic, mildly surrealistic and characteristicly humouristic landscapes, blazing with proud color. His inspiration from art history is manifold and diverse, but you can trace Dutch and Flamish Reinaissance, 19th century surrealist Arnold Böcklin and dark Swedish masters Carl Fredrik Hill and Dick Bengtsson in these landscapes. Danne's most important inspiration, however, comes from his childhood, growing up at on the top of the Gärdet district here in Stockholm, overlooking the entire city and the islands of Djurgården and Lidingö and the Nacka peninsula – an endless 180 degree panorama which shifted guise, light, color and character day by day. I should know, because I've lived in the very same house myself for some fifteen years and my grandma and and grandpa lived here too, as did my beloved, recently deceased mother and now also my brother and his family.

Now just get your lacy behind down to that gallery and bring that phat wallet of yours with you – I dare promise that these paintings will just rise in value and, more importantly, grace your wall.

www.knapperbaumgarten.com

Dan makes a late Stockholm debut

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