Tom Cullberg

If you haven’t had a chance to visit the recently renamed Brundyn + Gonsalves gallery in Loop St., Cape Town (formerly iArt gallery), we recommend getting there before the 14^th of March to see painter Tom Cullberg’s solo exhibition entitled ‘Periphery’.

Periphery finds Cullberg navigating the border between the tangible and intangible, and is the first time that his abstracts have come to the fore alongside his signature cover portraits – and yet somehow the combination of abstract paint-scapes and representational cover portraits never feels disparate. The two dissimilar styles work in unison towards fleshing out Cullberg’s painterly objectives.

Throughout the exhibition, Cullberg’s unifying thread is the creation of a space comprised of subjective and personal free-association. This applies both to the artist himself during the creation process and to the viewer, who is observing the paintings. With little or no sense of a planned outcome or destination, the artist intuitively peruses the annals of his record and book collections and viscerally responds to his medium.

Subsequently, the logic behind his diverse arrangements of covers from his collections of pop, jazz and classical records, art theory texts, novels, children’s books and exhibition catalogues, is often opaque. Resembling a garage sale, the works play directly into the viewer’s tendency to formulate associations and bestow narratives based on what is familiar or intrigues.

Cullberg’s paintings exhibit a strong musical sensibility as brushwork, gestural lines and colour move into unconstrained intuitive territory. As a foil to the associative nature of the cover portraits, the abstracts mark a space of reflection. Exhibited alongside one another, the viewer is perpetually tugged between objective recognition and cognitive free-association, a space define as periphery.

Born in 1972 in Stockholm, Sweden, Tom Cullberg currently lives and works in Cape Town.

For more information visit www.brundyngonsalves.com