This is the Mural I made for my Exhibition “Efter Solsken Kommer Regn” that I had at the “LarsPalm” Gallery in Sandviken, Sweden.

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When I went home to my hometown, Sandviken, for some holidays, I was asked to put up an exhibition at the “LarsPalm” Gallery.

I called it “Efter solsken kommer regn”, (A direct translation would be “After sunshine there will be rain”). It’s a word twist of a Swedish saying, which I turned into a pessimistic meaning instead of the opposite. A little reminder that everything fun will eventually ran out and that reality will eventually catch up with you. That nothing lasts. It’s good to be prepared…

Here is some of the drawings I had for the exhibition. Worth to point out is that I didn’t have much time to finish my especially made drawings for the exhibition. Less then a week actually, and of top of that I also made a mural.

At the moment I don’t have any translations for the pictures. I’ll see if I write something down later.

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The poster for my exhibition “Efter Solsken Kommer Regn” at Gallery “LarsPalm” in Sandviken, Sweden

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The lovely Sketchbook Magazine asked me to do murals for their pop-up shop in Newburgh street in Carnaby, London. The shop was up for a month and they had workshops, seminars, sample sales, screenings and galleries. Each room had a theme decorated with murals of various illustrators. They assigned me with “the cupboard of curiosity”, a very suitable theme for me and my drawings.

Unfortunate I only had my phone’s camera available to document the mural and it doesn’t have any flash so the images are slightly blurred
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They also asked me to drew frames on the wall for their illustration gallery upstairs

Sketchbook documented the process on their blog:

Christopher James, the man and the eye behind the party photography site we know what you did last night, put together a pop-up store for the launch of his online store. The pop-up store, called “This space”, was up for five days during the London Fashion on Beak street, Just around the corner of the famous Carnaby street.

During the day it was a showroom and a sample sale from a selection of talented and upcoming designers and at night it had fashion shows and party events.

And because I made some prints for his store, he asked me if i wanted to exhibit some of my work, which I did.

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You can see more pictures from the store here

In the end of September the Blueprint magazine and Claystation presented a four-day interactive event at 100% Design London. The visitors had the opportunity to decorate and build a chair from paper, and enter a competition to win a full-scale version.

The Onepiece Chair is made from an innovative Swedish material called Re-board. The chair is manufactured in one go, including printing and cutting of joints and details. It can be specified in scale and delivered flat-packed at full scale ready to be folded into three dimensions. The Onepiece chair was designed by Ben Hughes, founder of Claystation and course director of the MA in industrial design at Central St. Martins

I was asked to create a design for one of the specially commissioned chairs for the event among with people like Funky little darlings, Jem Fevzi, Jonathan Ball, Margo Selby, Steve Wilson, Sean Mackaoui and more…

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Murals for my solo exhibition “Neuro Disney”

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Between the 23rd of July and the end of August you could go and see my exhibition at the Old Shoreditch station in London. It was called Neuro Disney – a name I had adopted from a blog a friend of my girlfriend used to have. A title that very much sums what I generally draws and create.

Whitin the show I wanted to play with the strange, drawing situations with people, without sounding too pretentious, that one day would see an alternative ‘real’ reality, not knowing if it’s true or not, or about someone who’s maybe loosing the grip of reality or having this weird dreams. At the same time i wanted it to have aspects of weird theme parks.

The show was mentioned in The New York Times (by Alice Pfeiffer)

(Click on images to enlarge and for some descriptions)

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MARTIN WOLLERSTAM
‘NEURO DISNEY’
PV: THURSDAY 23RD JULY
24TH JULY – 30TH AUGUST

For his first solo show in London, Martin presents a collection of drawings which, rendered as simple, stylistically infantile doodlings, appear superficially as playful and amusing. However, a far cry from the technicolour musings and the homogeneous, race-less caricatures that now pour from Walt’s studio, Martin’s alternate, primarily monochrome Neverland, stimulates ominous, often desolate nuances which serve to gather the clouds of an anxiety laden zeitgeist. These subverted and satirical imaginings are reminiscent of the Lewis Carroll’s undertone and his technique draws parallel to the hugely influential Andrew Rae and The Peepshow Collective’s Perverted Science projects which approached some of these sentiments in an albeit more whimsiacal fashion at the turn of the millennia

With the threat of a new calamity around every corner Neuro Disney is this artists cathartic response; a psychologically defunct theme park, it declares ‘This is our imperfect world. This is our sad playground, This is my fear, but I will still find ways to play.’

Illustrator and artist Martin Wollerstam was born in 1981 in Sweden. Having no formal art education Martin started out his artistic career the way most self taught talents do, creating work purely for himself and his friends. He soon progressed into the world commercial design creating flyers for club nights in his hometown.

Since moving to London just over two years ago, Martin has relentlessly strived to bring his work to the public. In 2008 he created a window for our boutique, no-one, an in his short time here has built a sizeable portfolio that includes murals, illustrations and designs for brands such as Selfridges, Swear and Fabric.

For the upstairs gallery I made three prints with urban themes. They are A3 prints on matt c-type paper. If you want to buy them I print them in good quality and send them to you for £40/print(within the UK, if you are living abroad then you’ll have to pay extra for the postal charges) contact me at martin@wollertam.com.

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We live next door to our neighbours in the big urban environment we call cities. But we usually don’t know more about them than that. I made a mural about a residential house where you could have a look what our neighbours where doing and the diffent ways we where living. This is as one of three things that I contributed for the We Heart Urbanism exhibition.

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After days of sweating, freezing, aching muscles and a bad back I finally finished the murals for the We heart Urbanism exhibition. The biggest of them is a long black organic mass of city flesh which gives the urbanized humans different kinds of experiences- up and downs, hope and dreams, horrors and nightmares, homes and monsters.

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Press release:

‘WE HEART URBANISM’

DALSTON SUPERSTORE

Private View Tuesday may 5^th, 7 till 10 pm

117 Kingsland High Street, E8 2PB

‘Urbanism, that lover who makes our cities fascinating,
That lover who creates more barriers between us’. (Alessandro Bartolomei)

East London’s brand new venue the Dalston Superstore presents to you ‘We Heart Urbanism’, an exhibition born from the pages of Swedish illustrator Martin Wollerstam’s unique fanzine ‘Heart Heart’.

Wollerstam’s unmistakable illustrations are fast becoming a notorious part of east London’s urban landscape and across the board. His mono graphic lines create and deliver a twisted wit and social commentary; it is this individual take on the world that makes his curatorial skills so interesting and has resulted in this exhibition.

We heart Urbanism explores the work of five artists from around the world, living and creating work in urban environments, and exploring their responses to the concept of Urbanism. Through their artistic perception and language, a thought process is uncovered which creates a visual and conceptual urban landscape from the artist’s point of view.

Unexpectedly this is not an exhibition of Street art influenced work but subtle descriptions and poetic capturing of what makes us/we urban.

Martin Wollerstam is a Swedish illustrator based in London. He’s received commissions from Selfridge’s, Swear and night club Fabric to name a few.
His work is concerned about the ‘possibilities of illustrating the feelings and the emotions of his dark humoured drawings’.

Argentinean photographer Julia Corsaro is based in London. Her work mainly consists in documenting her own personal experience with any available camera and ordering pictures in sets that suggest hidden narratives.
As a part of music and art collective GIRLCORE, she is working together with other members in the launch of an art publication that will showcase female talent around the world.

Italian Photographer Alessandro Bartolomei is based in London and has had numerous exhibitions of his work in Italy.

Bigote Rojo is a Swedish born artist who lives between Sweden and London, for this exhibition his work concentrates on A highly populated urban environment called ‘Urville’ on an island off the coast of France. His work explores concepts of urban creators and the relationship between them, their metropolis, its inhabitants and humanity as a whole.

London based artist Alex Noble draws influences form Art Nouveau, comic books, 70’s poster art, myths and legend, pornography, sub culture, pop art, and fetishism.

In this exhibition he explores a humorous personal take on his responses to Urbanism, street culture, ghetto’s, urban jungles and homo eroticism in an urban landscape.

In December, there was a one night exhibition and music event in a warehouse in Shoreditch, London. I contributed with a large mural, Unfortunally due to licence issues the night finished as early as 10pm.

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(credits to Alex Bartolomei for taking the photos)

My friend Alex (who also took the pictures above) helped me out and took one picture of the progress every 15 min (now afterwards I know we should have taken it every 10 or 5 min) for me to do a simple (read: very simple) animation of it. I will probably make another better one in the future. Here is the result:

(or see it on youtube)

During my time in Berlin there was exhibition in the summer called White On White
I contributed with two paintings called “The White Lie #1″ and “The White Lie #2″

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