In the creative work of Robert Lucander we detect references both to pop art and to surrealism. Since the mid-1990s the artist’s pictorial world has displayed influence from popular culture. He derives inspiration from the mass media, from the world of fashion and from such journals as Café, Elle and Se &amp; Hör. Colours are crucial in Lucander’s paintings. His use of flashy, gaudy tones reflects the aesthetics familiar from advertisements and record covers, from brochures and pulp literature. His pictorial idiom undergoes continual transition, however, and his colour schemes have grown milder with time. In his watercolours he depicts bodies and faces that are puzzlingly difficult to interpret, both beautiful and bizarre, seductive yet expressionless at the same time. The artist’s reference here is to the media’s façade in which the individual is concealed behind a mask. Robert Lucander was educated at the Free Art School and the Aalto School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki and at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.

Art work: Robert Lucander, He is Able to Keep His Various Roles Separated, 1998

Art work: Robert Lucander, The Revolution Will Not be Colourized, 1998