Leif Ericson – A Tribute to Play, Imagination and Music
In the autumn of 1958, Leif Ericson exhibited at Liljevalchs alongside 16 other young artists who had studied under Endre Nemes at the Valand Academy of Art. Öyvind Fahlström reviewed the exhibition in Göteborgs-Tidningen and was struck by a new generation of artists who, in a playful and life-affirming way, freely mixed seemingly contradictory visual languages – narrative, abstract, and figurative. Leif Ericson’s artistic practice can be likened to a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art—where the chaos of life and art forms an organic whole. His complex visual world encompasses a wide range of cultural and artistic references. Over the years, he created a unique imaginative universe through thousands of drawings, paintings, mobiles, sculptures, collages, marionettes, and masks. Work titles such as Chaplin in the Zoological Garden, Danish Circus, Jazz Music, and Kino Pollock clearly reveal how his sources of inspiration extend far beyond the conventional horizons of art. In his book Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga emphasised play as a fundamental and constitutive factor in humanity’s historical and cultural development. The book played a significant role in establishing Homo Ludens as a central concept in 20th-century art, music, and literature. Movements such as Dadaism – with its radical critique of rationality and structure – and Surrealism, with its ideas around automatism, embraced the subversive power of play early on. For artists like Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, and Alexander Calder, play was not merely an artistic method but a means of challenging societal conventions and established norms. Calder created his renowned work Cirque Calder between 1926 and 1931 – a miniature circus featuring marionettes made from simple materials like wire, fabric, and found objects. He performed the circus himself, often for friends, artists, and critics, and the freedom of play became an essential part of his artistic expression. Read more