In the image Landscape at Soumaya Olof Nimar has photographed a museum interior from the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City. In the center of the image there is a small painting by Claude Monet, Landscape at Giverny. It is shown hanging by wires from a remarkable construction. Through the exhibition in Gislaveds Konsthall the series Givernys Generosity has been placed at intervals, images of tulips from the painter Monet´s garden in Giverny. A garden that is a meticulous staging of motives for the artists paintings, like all gardens a kind of artificial nature.

In the exhibition , the staging is also of central importance. A photograph can be window, a means of transporting the viewer to another place. Olof Nimars images close that peephole and flatten the images illusory depth. For a moment the photographs appear as surfaces of lines and fields of color, something like a painting. In the next moment, the depth unfolds again transformed into a kind of diorama. An arranged space defined by our experiences and associations to the same extent as walls and ceiling. This is a scene that open outward into the exhibition space and inward into the audience.

Wet Hair is taking place between the images and the exhibition can be read as a single large scale working the sense that all the images are connected and form a world, an artificial nature on the border between fiction and reality. Nimars photographs insist on being images – “this is not a pipe” nor is it a mushroom or a tulip to paraphrase Rene Magritte. A kind of paradox is created and the familiar slowly grows more strange.

As an audience of photography we are used to borrowing the eye of the photographer, in Olof Nimar’s exhibition our bodies are activated to the same extent. Like a mirror ball in a garden the small piece My Face hangs in a corner of the exhibition. In the shiny surface of the photographed object we see a reflection of the photographer in the same position as the audience, we share the same space.

Text by Nils Svensk