Olof Hjalmar is a self-taught comic artist and illustrator living and working out of the forest around Hjörnered’s lakes. With experiences as a carpenter, folk musician and organising art festivals, living abroad for many years as well as being a drop out of no less than two university courses he has come the long way round to the field of picture-making. Carrying a flaming passion for comics he is now exploring the media as graphic prints; book covers and illustrations while also making protest comics in collaboration with Ronak Rabiee.
About the work: Nature. Rustling leaves and tall grasses, towering forests and lakes shimmering in the sun. The struggle of life with its beauty, brutality and the seething intensity between these, a place in-between things which release us and lets us dream of harmony. I put my self here to dream, to singe my fingers on the friction. A search for glory in futility. I am a picture-maker and a comic-maker working through my childhood (and adult) passion for comics and for the environment. The nature where I grew up, with its complexity and indifference to human values, is a constant inspirational source which mangles and reduces my strive for meaning into many little pieces. There is the most beautiful, there is the most terrifying, and it is these that I am intending to unite in my images. The comics with their panels, side-by-side in a unified composition, create something more than their parts. Meaning emerges in the space between the images, a release, space for dreaming.
works in the exhibition
“Smoke Above the Sacrifice” (2023)
- digital print on paper
- dimensions:(90 x 101 cm)
- venue: GALLERI MONITOR
“Agony of Hesitation” (2023)
- digital print on paper
- dimensions:(50 x 70 cm)
- venue: GALLERI MONITOR
“The Betraying Grass” (2023)
- digital print on paper
- dimensions: (32 x 59 cms)
- venue: GALLERI MONITOR
contact: olofalacarte (at) gmail.com
website: https://olofhjalmar.webflow.io/
exhibition.school 