LEONARD FORSLUND

LEONARD FORSLUND

Visual artist. Born 1959 in Landskrona, Sweden. Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“The filth in your eye conceals the darkness of your mind, stains your morality, and reveals everything that disappears the very moment you blink.”

In the eye’s blind spot, the optic disc, there are no photoreceptor cells. There, we see nothing of reality. Instead, the brain fills in what is missing, as if we were actually seeing something. In a similar way, our gaze can be obscured: by a grain of sand in the eye that temporarily blocks vision, or – today – by the forces of global politics that position themselves between us and reality. In such moments, a substitute reality emerges, a narrative that takes hold where actual reality is no longer visible, replacing what we once believed to be true.

Through his three painting series – Blind Spot, Blood Spot, and Gold Spot – the artist seeks to direct attention toward how reality is interpreted through three gestures: Blackness, Blood, and the Golden Shimmer. Three symbolic expressions, intertwined throughout history.

Blackness: the darkness where misfortune resides, where uncertainty draws forth something that fixes the gaze, ensnares curiosity, and ultimately paralyzes consciousness. Blood: the color of life, a bearer of nourishment and movement, from which the future is formed—a future whose grounding in reality rests in the dreams that give rise to hope. The Golden Shimmer: a reflective radiance of divine power, where value is not measured in material substance but in the reality that is permitted to prevail.

All three series comprise the same eight motifs, drawn from the torrent of images that constantly rush through our reality—via mass media, social platforms, and personal searches in the vast sea of online images, where algorithms largely govern our choices. Despite this, he has made a conscious selection of motifs that diverge from one another, guided by a principle of distribution and variation, together reflecting different places and states within contemporary reality.

Through these selected images and the blocking, symbolic color fields, Leonard Forslund attempts to draw attention to the shifting meanings that arise in the transition between black, red, and gold—a fascistoid triad that, in our time, re-emerges as a spectral shadow over the present.

Artist´s CV.

EXHIBITIONS

På tværs, duo exhibition with Hedvig Greiffenberg 2026.02.07 – 2026.03.08

AVAILABLE ARTWORKS