When I started working on the piece it suddenly struck me that Donald Trump is constantly distorting the truth in what he says and does. I decided to mirror all text on half of the painting and as a ball of lightning I realised that in the context of my work this was a revolution. Suddenly I could create a mirrored world, a false world. From that, MirrorLand was created…
Thomas Broomé
The following interview forms part of a series where repsychl invites contemporary artists to reflect on their personal history, meaning, and philosophy, and how those are embedded throughout their creative process.
This week, we share an interview with Thomas Broomé, a Swedish artist whose works have crossed continents – exhibiting in places as far as New York, Singapore, and Sāo Paulo. His painted series, MirrorLand, is the centre of our conversation – a fantasy world reflecting a real experience of ‘wrongness’, as well as distortion of truth at the hands of powerful figures.
One aspect of the MirrorLand series that you describe is a kind of atmosphere of ‘wrongness’: “…my other senses tell me that something is wrong. It does not smell right, it does not feel right. And even though I can hear nothing it does not sound right…” What does it bring up for you, experimenting with this kind of atmosphere in your work?
Every exhibition is an encounter with the unknown. Even when it is ‘just’ making paintings from an environment as when I was at Ingmar Bergman’s house for three months and ended up doing portraits of every room in the house. I guess that what I brought with me into the paintings was this uncanny feeling of walking around in a dead man’s home.
MirrorLand is a concept, it is what I choose to call the feeling that something is wrong in our world. I know that a lot of people are feeling the same way and that it is easy to blame social media, the economic system, new management or any other new invention that supposedly ruined our lives. I feel that these are all just symptoms of a more profound and existential problem in that of truth vs false. If you take social media for instance, one of the obvious problems is that people project a happy and accomplished life into the flow. But we all know that this is often not true. It is what they want to show from their lives, a curated life. So by knowing this we also know that our lives are not what they are supposed to be, and the natural question is: Is my life real? MirrorLand is constructed to be an anti or a bizarro world, a what if… scenario.
You have written about how sometimes you have “no idea why [connections you make] are important… sometimes you “have to trust this state and just go with it”. What is it you are trusting in this state? When you give your trust or surrender to that state, what differences do you feel it makes to your process?
This is the result of years working as an artist. In the beginning I was finding ideas by looking at other artists and their work. Now I have a body of work and they are like stepping stones which I can use to develop ideas and concepts. It is all about trusting the process, I know that I now have a foundation, I have built other worlds on this foundation. I have successfully navigated the abyss before and that gives me freedom to take chances and just go with what I do.
What inspired you to paint Trump’s luxury apartment from 1985? (shown above: MirrorLand, 2020)
When Trump became president of the USA, I saw some pictures from his home at Trump Towers. It was truly awful and I was so surprised by the tackiness of the apartment. Not that I believe that Donald Trump is a beacon of style, but this was really hideous. I remembered that Trump was the ultra Yuppie back in the 80s. So I looked for pictures from back then. I do not know if it is Trump that changed or if Ivana Trump just had a (to me) more palatable taste.
I loved the 80s apartment. When I started working on the piece it suddenly struck me that Donald Trump is constantly distorting the truth in what he says and does. I decided to mirror all text on half of the painting and as a ball of lightning I realised that in the context of my work this was a revolution. Suddenly I could create a mirrored world, a false world. From that, MirrorLand was created, it is of course so much more now, but this was the birth of the concept.
Is there a sense of how your artistic process influences your way of experiencing the world, just as it might influence the other way around?
Absolutely, it is always in some weird flux between what is ”real” and what is imaginary. Without sounding crazy, I am not completely convinced that what we see and experience is the actual reality. There is some interesting scientific work done by Donald Hofmann and Anil Seth, too mention just two, that questions what we experience on a fundamental level.
In a world where failure was impossible, how might your art be different?
I guess it would be extremely boring. For me it is extremely important to embrace failure and mistakes. Often they are what makes my pieces interesting. There is a misconception floating around that failure is something bad, failure is life. If you do not get it right it just means that you learned how to do it wrong and that can be even more interesting. Without failure there can be no new learning.
bell hooks wrote, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.” How does this resonate with you?
That sounds like a good statement, but so do many others. To me there is no true way to make art, you just make it. Usually when a piece is finished I am surprised at what is in front of me. When the obsession is gone, I can see the work as a visitor would. Maybe I would say something similar to bell hooks when the work is finished, but I could never say it before.
See more of Thomas Broomé’s works and keep up to date with upcoming exhibitions: Website
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