Ulf Enhörning,
born 1956 in Stockholm, Sweden, grew up in Sweden, Canada and the United
States. At an early age his grandmother, Louise Peyron, also a painter,
introduced him to the works of masters at galleries in Stockholm. She
told him stories about their lives and also encouraged his interest to
draw and sculpt his siblings. Salvador Dali was Ulf’s greatest hero at
this time, but when he later immigrated to Toronto with his family at
the age of 15, he was greatly inspired by the mystical landscape
paintings of Lawren Harris.
At the age of 21, Enhörning was
introduced to oil painting at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His
first painting was of a nude, which he placed in an imaginary landscape
of mountains and a sky full of clouds. Her face resembled a work his
grandmother had painted of his mother. He became obsessed with this
painting and felt the need to work on his own and quickly found a studio
space on campus where the teacher would visit to see his progress. Later
he studied briefly at the Victoria College of Art, Victoria, Canada, but
did not stay long as he felt the teachers were imposing their views too
much.
During his twenties he experimented with
colour discovering a vast world and means of expressing emotion and a
simple but elegant technique for mixing shadow colours.
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In 1983, at the age of 27, Enhörning returned to
Sweden retracing his roots. In Uppsala, he began
a series of geometrical com-positions, exploring
colour and its relative nature. Squares I
was the first one in this |
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series. The process
felt much the same as musical composition. In 1987, he had a solo
exhibition based upon this theme in Toronto's Yorkville which he called
"visual music". Later that same year, he returned to British Columbia.
There, he continued to paint, write songs for voice and guitar, and
study electronic music at the University of Victoria. He had previously
worked with one of the first computer music systems in the world, the
Structured Sound Synthesis Project (SSSP) at the University of Toronto.
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In
1992, he painted She as an expression of
his feelings for a woman. In his search for
colours that would express his feelings, he
found a new palette of soft pastels in a warm
glow. |
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Having previously painted
with more contrast, Ulf was now drawn to a gentler world of less
contrast and warmer colours bringing an ethereal light to his
essentially empty landscapes of land, sea and sky.
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Sometimes,
these landscapes are seen from inside a house, through a
window or door. The viewer escapes the confining interior of
convention and tradition to wide open spaces to distant
horizons of hope and to sensual cloud formations free from a
rigid man-made world dominated by |
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straight lines of
logic. There is a deliberate dichotomy in his dialog between opposite
elements; inside and outside, architectural and natural, straight and
curved, shadow and light, confinement and open space, reality and dream.
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His work has been
compared to Lawren Harris, René Magritte and Christopher Pratt in its
surrealistic quality and architectural elements.
In the spring of 1999, Ulf had a solo show at "Bean around the World" in
Victoria, BC, Canada. He had several paintings looking through windows,
but had introduced a new perspective. The viewer was now invited to look
down at an angle through a window opening to restful fields of patched
farmland spotted by shadows of clouds.
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Inspired by a good
review, Ulf decided to take the idea further and began Cloud
Shadows while his show was still running. This became the first
painting in a series of aerial views. He now removed the window
frame |
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entirely and tilted
the angle 90 degrees to the horizontal - straight down. In a sense he
had returned to the colour compositions he had begun in Sweden in 1985,
but the squares now consisted of patches of farmland. However, he would
still choose the colours of the fields in much the same way he would
compose his abstract paintings or music.
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In
the summer of 1999, Ulf went back to Sweden
for a family reunion. There, he began his
large series of miniature paintings. The
small format allowed him to make quick
painting sketches outside and to expand his
visual vocabulary.
Since then, he has painted more outside in
what he calls the large studio where
the ceiling is really high. There is an
endless amount of things to paint outside,
but he still paints with the same adherence
to a sense of balance. He uses the real
world as raw material and then transforms it
into his own vision. |
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In the winter of 2001
he stayed in
Vero Beach,
Florida where he worked on a theme song to be presented at Toronto's bid
for the 2008 summer Olympics. This song, Stars Shining, was later
performed by a choir of 150 children.
In the spring of 2001,
Ulf drove diagonally across America from Florida to British Columbia,
the west coast of Canada. This trip took three weeks and has been
documented with photographs in his
diary.
He stayed a couple of years on Salt Spring Island and in 2004 he went to
Portugal to find inspiration for an upcoming show in Stockholm, Sweden.
During the winter 2004/2005, he drove to Algarve, Portugal and painted
landscapes and cityscapes on site. Having built a bed in his car and a
box on his roof, it enabled him to travel around the country and paint.
www.enhorning.nu |
