Joakim Hansén at Miami River Art Fair 2018

I enjoy exploring themes related to mankind’s complicated relations with the planet we inhabit.

I am influenced and inspired by what I see and my travel experiences. The flow of mass media, social media, politics, conflicts, advertising, comic strips, video games, movies and so forth are expresses in my series of paintings in large and small formats and sculptures.

I am engaged in a continual dialog with art’s historical forefathers while looking for signals from the future. This encompasses an eager collecting of information which then illuminates the shadow world of the subconscious. Dreams, visions and ideas are continuously born and I work fervently to make them concrete.

My big canvasses are constructed like symphonies with numerous details woven in a rhythmic flow where color and light create the mood.

Our globe, slowly rotating in the luminance of the sun, gives us a daily cascade of sentiment and a never ending source of images to draw from."

The Swedish artist Joakim Hansén takes his inspiration from the big city life, especially from the un-derground and punk worlds, he is one of the leading artists of this art style. He has created posters for rock and jazz festivals, the Moderna Muséet in Stockholm and for the denim brands Lois, Warrick and Levi’s. He has painted murals in rock clubs, biker bars, restaurants, hotels and clothing boutiques.

He has also designed graphics for the Jockey brand as well as logos, stickers and album covers for va-rious bands and brands. He painted murals outside several boutiques at Gamla Brogatan, the Carnaby Street of Stockholm. He is especially recognized for the mural and posters he made for Sko-Uno, Stoc-kholm’s cult mod/punkshoestore.

Over the past 15 years Joakim has been a prime force in creating the fantasy and comic aesthetics of amusement rides and environments at the classic amusement park "Gröna Lund" in central Stockholm. He has created complete themed areas familiar to all Stockholmers and visited by millions every summer.

SELECTED PAINTING FOR MIAMI RIVER ART FAIR 2018

The Eremite Diner, Acrylic on canvas, 2018

It is not easy to be a hermit today! This is the first observation that comes to us looking Hermits Diner Joakim Hansen.

The theme of the relationship of religions with modern society is approached by the artist in a pop key and breaks our eyes and our thinking with a seemingly humorous key with this posterized style, which reminds us of a comic book. But here nothing is left to chance.

Every detail invites us to think about the world and the way we live.

And here is a Christ with sunglasses who ironically invites us to his restaurant made out of an old motor. The scene is that of an urban Apocalypse where there is no trace of human beings ... we can suppose, imagine, that behind the organization of this world there is a human logic but, alas, it is only an assumption because in the work only robots and machines are depicted ... will they still control humans or machines have taken over?

The Tower of Babel, Acrylic on canvas, 2015

A dilemma that does not seem willing to answer the only being in human form that appears in a kind of cameo, right on the engine Hermits Diner. A hermit fled or confined on his column, who knows how or from whom, looks from the top of his column lost on a small island adrift in the ocean.

Is the future perhaps the one that sees from the top of his column? And really we guess in his look compassion for what he left?

Once again, the kaleidoscopic imagination of Joakim Hansen invites us inexorably and insinuates through his picture the doubt whether what we are experiencing is an evolution or a social disintegration.

It forces us to reflect, to get out of our isolation because in this way we must still live and be overwhelmed ... even the hermits no longer make sense in society .. All that remains is to go down to explore it, for better or for worse.