Robert Hilmersson

The mixed media collages of Robert Hilmersson evoke a storehouse of aesthetic precedents from the pop art of the 1980’s, to contemporary work in new media and graphic design.  They immediately call to mind the consumer culture they often represent with the oversaturated palette of advertising and the excess of images that mark contemporary existence. While remaining inside a long tradition of montage, these works reject the exaggerated two dimensionality of their forbears in favor of a more painterly use of plane; emphasizing certain objects, dismissing others. The subjects, however classically placed, are radically distinct from academic traditions in their form, fragments of bodies, logos, the ephemera of everyday life.  

These surprising juxtapositions may be attributed in part to the artist’s extensive travels and his relationship to largely American iconography as an artist living and working in Sweden.   This oblique stance vis a vis the media images to which Americans are habituated, has lent to his works a critical originality that reinvigorates and reorients these over-produced mediums and through them creates new messages.