He had run out of ideas and was running out of time. So he turned his problems into art
Persson has work held in most of our major galleries as well as the Auckland Art Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This month, his latest exhibition, Black Swans, opened at Anna Schwartz Gallery – and all of the works come from having absolutely no ideas, he says.
'I'd been out of the studio for a while ... and I'd just lost the rhythm,' he explains. 'For a couple of weeks I had literally no ideas... I just couldn't see it. And then I thought, why don't I make work about having no ideas – deal with the problem.'
As he gazed at Post-it notes stuck on the wall – featuring scribbled lines from texts that resonated with him – he realised he was not the first to face this predicament. Having read about 'black swan events' recently, and having painted swans in the past, he decided to get to work and combine the two.
Originally used to describe an impossible event – prior to 1697, no European knew black swans existed – the term now refers to a highly improbable event that once it occurs, seems inevitable. Coined in the context of financial markets by US-based former options trader Nassim Taleb in 2007, the term 'black swan event' now has a broader cultural meaning.
Persson's series takes quotes from some of our greatest artistic minds and makes them spout from the mouths of black swans. Some of the lines are amusing, some are poignant; all of them ring true.
'Once it happened, it came together rather quickly,' he says. 'I had this one little painting which was an abstract I had done in the '90s, that became the background. I thought about that heraldic space where animals talk, those medieval balloons.'
Though most of the paintings were well underway before the second election of Donald Trump, as every day brings new black swan events, the works feel particularly prescient.
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