Galleri Karlsson 1968 [signed]

Carl Johan De Geer, born in 1938, grew up in absurd privilege and abject unhappiness as a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful aristocrat families. His parents showed no discernable interest in him or his siblings, and so he grew up on a grand country estate with his grandparents, went to art school in the late 1950’s, and in an epic choice of rejection lived his life to this day as a perennial Swedish underground artist, working in counterpoint to the privilege of his surname. De Geer, as a masterful Leica M4 snapshot giant à la Van Der Elsken or Daido Moriyama, has the sacred ability to capture the monotone grit of everyday life and demand its reflection. He gives us a glimpse of a Sweden inhabited by people who are the other, whose life experience is impregnated with otherness, providing a visual cue into an unseen world. The visible scratches, fades and imperfections, the wabi-sabi of this collection of vintage prints, is reflected in the images." Galleri Karlsson 1968 is the softbound catalogue published in conjunction with the Johan Kugelberg curated 2009 Boo-Hooray exhibition of the gritty Vietnam-era social reportage of this unsung Swedish master that parallels the work Ed Van Der Elsken and Anders Peterson. — F.to: 20x15; pagg. 36; BN; rileg. brossura. Editore: Ectoplasm Books, New York, 2009.