LARS NORDIN

 

”I have never said that I want to be alone - I have only said that I want to be left alone, that is a mile wide difference”
– Greta Garbo

Lars Nordin probably has the biggest collection of original Greta Garbo pictures in the world. In the summer of 2016, ”The Image of Garbo” was displayed at Fotografiska, Stockholm. Nordin’s collection was behind the whole show. It became a big success with 100 000 visitors in two months. He uses this collection as an inspiration in his creations. Nordin has had several exhibitions in Sweden and abroad with his Garbo art over the past fifteeen years, but also many other exhibitions in other contexts.

About the pieces
Garbo was fantastic already in her youth, fascinating her teacher Mrs Rönnell in pre-school. This resulted in a very long and unique friendship between the two. Rönnell even saves small poems, drawings and other things from when she had Greta at pre-school. As most people know, Greta never wrote autographs. That is why hers became the 90’s most exclusive and difficult to access. However, Rönnell received a beautiful signature written with a bleeding goose pen that was posted in a beautiful calligraphed envelope from Hollywood. ”This signature and these small cute documents are also a part of my collection. I use parts of this material in my pictures”, Nordin explains. Nordin has furthermore produced around 100 abstract paintings and tens of thousands of pictures in his selfmade image bank that he constantly looks in. Lars always stems from his own paintings, illustrations or photography which he then mixes together with small original text, handwritten information (often taken from the back of the pictures). He thereafter matches this material with one or a few of the Garbo images from his collections and processes them in different ways to create a new threshold of originality and a new context.

”I started collection Garbo pictures after I received a contact in New York via an exciting conversation with an old lady at an old peoples’ home in Helsinborg. After that, a long and exciting journey began. This is almost 25 years ago now and the more you look into this woman’s destiny and carreer, the more fascinated you become. Greta Garbo is historically Sweden’s most famous woman worldwide. A woman with extreme integrity that had a very strange fate, to say the least”, Lars finishes.

Websites
www.larsnordin.se
www.treshombresart.com