Nils Thornander

Born in Stockholm in 1958 and died in Paris in 2022, Nils Thornander explored the porosity of the boundaries between fields, practices and ideas.

An experimental artist, he has created paintings, large musical compositions, immersive installations, videos, and numerous writings. JOUR, the collection of his aphorisms has just been published by EdiSens Paris.

Its themes question the notions of conflicts, territories and identities. For him, art must invent a harmonic harmony for a fragmented world, a continuum of beauty and meaning. His work has been exhibited in Stockholm, Barcelona, Paris, New York, Chicago, Bogota, Seoul…

In Paris, Nils Thornander's works have been presented at the Center Georges Pompidou, at the Museums of Modern Art in Paris, Zadkine and Bourdelle, at CentQuatre, at Laborigins, at IRCAM, and in numerous galleries. The AA magazine has given carte blanche to Le Poste, a digital photo-sound installation commissioned by Subjectif hypermedia.

He initiated collaborations with many creators.

With Gilles Verdiani, he created The Erogenous Zone, a relational work from which De la Réception as one of the Fine Arts (Parcours Saint Germain, 2006) comes in particular. With Mildred Simantov, he imagined the Nice Institution, and the Réfectoire works (Nuit Blanche 2010, Musée Carnavalet, Paris); Olympic Smoking Area (Chic Art Fair 2010, Cité de la mode et du Design, Paris); Adult Age (Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2012). At the beginning of the 2020s he initiated his series Flags for Future Identities.

As a geographer of chaos, and lover of humankind, he paints the flags which could seal an alliance, signify a reconciliation of opposites, a harmony of dissonances.

Nils Thornander's colors come from somewhere else where blandness has no place. They come from landscapes where each tone is an emotion, an opinion, a manifesto.

And implicitly, in his palimpsest paintings, all the beauty of the world is hidden.

- Edith Simonnet