Johan Wahlstrom born in Stockholm in 1959, Sweden is an artist who is making a conscious effort to describe the social political landscape of our contemporary world.
Johan Wahlstrom ́s ironic series Social Life gives a perfect sense both from a conceptual as a formal point of view of this estrangement. He is a magnificent observer of our social life’s.
He is a fifth-generation artist on his mother’s side.
His first creative direction was rock and roll, where he had a successful and long career as a keyboardist and singer, touring with Ian Hunter, Graham Parker, Mick Ronson and many Scandinavian artists. After 18 years, the rock and roll life caught up with him. Wahlstrom moved to a small village in France where he did nothing but paint for seven years, part of that time under the tutelage of Swedish artist, Lennart Nystrom. Wahlstrom’s dark narrative paintings of heads and torsos are inspired by cryptic, often ironic social critiques that he collects on scraps of paper in his studio. Wahlstrom lives and works in Jersey City, NJ, USA. His works have been exhibited since 1998 across Europe and the USA in solo shows and group shows with artists like Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Santiago Sierra, Erwin Olaf, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Jake & Dinos Chapman, and David Salle.