Erik Dietman

Erik Dietman (1937-2002), born in Jönköping and raised in Värnamo, left his home to settle in France in 1959, where he lived until his death at various addresses in southern France and in and around Paris.

He came to a Paris where it was wildly experimented in both the visual arts and literature. The various objects and waste products provided by the consumer society, he used to widen his frames of expression. Nothing was too “low” or trivial to find its place in the works of art.

It was in this environment he began plastering the objects that got in his way including his own body. This activity rendered him a degree of fame as the “patch king” before he abandoned that material and threw himself into association-rich and double-bottomed language games in which humour was an important part of the message. In the language games, French, English and Swedish met while the objects became words and the words objects. When he bakes the word PAIN it is a matter of course, in French pain means bread, but read it in English and it stands for pain. In collage and painting he would come to develop a delirious storytelling, a modern Baroque who understood taking the turns out properly.

In the 1980s he took the plunge fully into the three-dimensional world and eventually came to classify himself as a “sculptor classicus”. This did not mean that he renounced the freedom in the choice of materials and means of expression that had become his hallmark, the finest marble combined with the raw gray rock, glass with cast iron, bronze with aluminum.

Erik Dietman chose the artist's greatest challenge, that of always being himself. He protected all external regulations and groupings that implied preconceptions about what art should be. Therefore, art for him became a never-ending story about the wonderful and terrible, about the beautiful and the ugly, about the grandiose and the small detail. In short: A story of life.

Although Erik Dietman spent his entire active life in France and with much of Europe and parts of Asia as an exhibition site, there was a channel left to the old homeland. All works in this exhibition, except “Un livre sterling” belonging to Louisiana in Humlebaek, are in Swedish collections.

At the time of Erik Dietman's death, he worked as a professor of sculpture at the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Curator: Olle Granath