Simon Stalenhag: retrofuturism (66 photos)
Swede Simon Stalenhag is not yet a master in the field of fine art, but the young artist’s works are already extremely popular on the Internet. The author was noticed thanks to the unusual combination of future technologies and pastoral landscapes in his paintings, which art critics designated as “retrofuturism” and “neo-socialist realism.”
The natural beauty of the Swedish landscape fascinated the artist and designer from an early age
Simon Stlenhag, who grew up in a suburb of Stockholm. It was by depicting landscapes and animals in the spirit of his favorite Swedish artists that he first became seriously interested in painting.
Subsequently, Stålenhag turned his hobby into a career, and still paints the same landscapes, only now they are filled with robots, dinosaurs, and incredible machines.
Stålenhag came up with a whole backstory that shaped the dystopian reality of his paintings:
“In the 1950s, the government launched a huge nuclear accelerator and research laboratory just a few kilometers from Stockholm. The laboratory is located underground and produces a large number of experimental technologies. Up until the 70s everything goes great, but then the system begins to collapse. Bad things start to happen. The images on my website show the lives of the people of that world, and how they were affected by the fiasco of a gigantic scientific project. Nobody knows how it will all end."
