4PM Self BUILD BY HANK GRÜNER
While fantasy is natural to a child, Hank Grüner had, perhaps more than his fair share. “Mine was so overloaded I had five psychologists hanging around,” remembers the Swedish artist. Born in Brazil, Grüner was adopted by a Swedish family and moved to a small town outside of Gothenburg at six months old, where he developed a rich alternative universe with his childhood toys.
February 7 – 2022
Words by Mairi Beautyman
The 1996 movie “Space Jam,” in which basketball player Michael Jordan travels to the animated Looney Tunes’ universe, was lifechanging for the teenage Grüner, who now canonizes his rich imagination into ceramics and large-scale paintings. “Eventually I learned drawing could help me with all of the things that I had in my head,” he notes. Here he shares the journey behind his customization of the 4PM Self Build chaise, and its mystical world including a squid, a devil, and characters taken from popular animations.
How did this reoccurring love affair with toys of the 1990s develop in your work?
The dreams that you have enable you to chase something. I chase to understand myself as a younger person. I take all of my imagination from what I loved as a child and still love to this day. I still have all of my childhood toys on a shelf in my studio, like Sailor Moon [a schoolgirl superhero from the Japanese anime series]; Street Sharks [characters that are half-man, half-shark]; Power Rangers [a team of superheroes], Transformers [giant robots that change into cars and other objects]; and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [turtles with superpowers that fight evil]. I also buy a lot of old toys from online sites. There are particular colors and shapes – such as the Transformer form – that I involve.
Could you describe a few of the drawings you made?Right as I began working on the chaise, I picked up two new Street Sharks figures. That meant I really wanted to draw them. On one of the biggest spaces on the chaise, the wood plate where you lay your feet, I drew a 10-centimeter-long, five-centimeter-wide Street Shark. There’s also another cartoon character, Casper the Friendly Ghost, as well as a skeleton dressed as the Grim Reaper, a dragon, a squid, and a devil riding a motorcycle in the desert with lightning coming down.
…A devil riding a motorcycle?
Say I start drawing a devil and then I add a motorcycle and then I think about a narrative to place yourself in…maybe the devil is going somewhere. Often they are ideas about what I want myself to be able to do, from flying to being a squid or big green fire-breathing dragon or riding a motorcycle…
While fantasy is natural to a child, Hank Grüner had, perhaps more than his fair share. “Mine was so overloaded I had five psychologists hanging around,” remembers the Swedish artist. Born in Brazil, Grüner was adopted by a Swedish family and moved to a small town outside of Gothenburg at six months old, where he developed a rich alternative universe with his childhood toys.
“Eventually I learned drawing could help me with all of the things that I had in my head”
Your 4PM Self Build is like a big collage.
I filled every spot on the three large front panels. There are a lot of clippings, drawings, and tags made from mixing old English or Germanic letters with current letters – although there are no words. Using acrylic, markers, pen, and paper, I left what you might call the skeleton of the chaise clean as the wood is so nice. A lot of stuff has been torn off in order to take on something new. What remains is worn out and layered.
“I started thinking about furniture accessible to everyone. The laminated wood used for the 4PM Self Build is very similar to that of the basketball court benches I remember from my childhood. These wooden benches were covered with tags and burn marks, and people were always drawing, for example, the name of a girlfriend. Somehow writing on the benches made them accessible to everyone, made them feel like it was their court. The court also had places where concert posters were repeatedly put up – after someone tried to rip off all of the concerts that had been, creating big clusters of papers. When I was making the chaise, I could see in my head all of these layers of concert posters.
Your collage effect is really unique. How did you create that?
Out one night, I met a girl who had been collecting National Geographic magazines for 20 years. She gave me a bunch, and now a big shelf in my studio is stacked with around 100 different ones. I rip out colorful pieces and then use brushes to apply acetone. Say it’s a butterfly – the color bleeds out and it gets more abstract. For the 4PM Self Build chaise, I chose a lot of photographs of coral with fish and underwater flowers. After drawing the squid, I pasted fish and underwater flowers around it in order to make a world mixed together.
What impression do you hope to give with your 4PM Self Build chaise?
“Really, it’s a big toy. I hope people might think, looking at the one I made, ‘I can do tags, I can draw, I can make another collage…hey, I could also do that in my own style.”
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4PM Self Build
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