Profile

Johan Wahlstrom is a Swedish artist living and working in Jersey City, NJ. He is one of today’s brightest artists making a conscious effort to describe the social political landscape of our contemporary world. Wahlstrom’s dark narrative paintings of heads and torsos in acrylic and ink are inspired by cryptic, often ironic social critiques that he collects on scraps of paper in his studio. Forbes Magazine covered him at the end of 2015, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton became the major topic in American society. He was introduced as an artist exemplifying social and political issues in his works, his style inspired by Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet and Basquiat.

His works have been exhibited since 1998 across Europe and the US. Recently in 2017, Wahlstrom held solo shows at Gallery Ekvall-Tornblom (Stockholm, Sweden) and Georges Bergés Gallery (New York). He has participated in three group shows at Whitebox (NY) in 2016, and has become an advisor. He has exhibited in the group shows with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys and Shepard Fairey, with future plans to present his work in a show with Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and few other very well known artists in Zurich, Switzerland in an exhibition curated by Paco Barragan at Petra Lossen Gallery.

Wahlstrom was born 1959 in Stockholm, Sweden.  He is a fifth-generation artist on his mother’s side. Although art was in his blood, 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, he decided to finish rock and roll life and focus on his career as a fine artist.
He would then move to a small village in France in 1998, where he did nothing but paint for seven years, part of that time under the tutelage of Swedish artist, Lennart Nystrom. He lived in Spain for 11 years from 2005 before going to live in New Jersey in 2016.