Name Bjorn Dawidsson | ||
 | ||
Triumph GTR4
Björn Dawidsson (born Örebro, 1949) who publishes as Dawid, is a Swedish photographer based in Stockholm.
Contents
Biography
1969 - 1970 Christer Strömholm’s School of Photography
1971 Beckmans Art School, graphic design
Dawid made his debut as a photographer in the early 1970s. Art critics have called him the country’s last modern and its first postmodern artist, challenging the tradition and perceived ideal of documentary photography which at that time dominated the photographic scene in Sweden. With his strong focus on the formal aspects of photography, he constantly explores the medium’s material and visual possibilities as well as its limits, often balancing on a tightrope between the graphic and the photographic. Dawid incessantly discovers new angles to look at those ordinary objects that surround us, simultaneously paying tribute to and questioning their given form. The radicalness, which characterizes Dawid’s works, lies in the constant testing and transgression of this threshold. In 1973, he had his first big solo exhibition “Ingen älskar mig” (Nobody loves me) at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm/Sweden, showing a selection of 50 small camera prints from 35mm negatives. Dawid started early to experiment with large negative shapes. His exhibition “Rost” in 1983 at Fotografiska Museet/Moderna Museet in Stockholm/Sweden, was a defining work of his early career: an open-ended series with 25 images in the exhibition. It marked a significant moment in his career as his works were exhibited at one of the most important Scandinavian art institutions.
The Rost series marked a fundamental shift away from both the style of his previous images and the parameters of 'straight' representational photography. Dawid has been continuing over the years with extensions to and elaborations of some of the series he has been making for a decade or more and parallelly taking new radical directions like i.e. the series MK/AW (2012/13). Constructed from the ephemeral fuzzy structures of ordinary TV screens without broadcast signals, Dawid has created illusionary fabric-like surfaces, exploring the different woven textures of a moment that was never meant to be visible in the first place.
Dawid has been exhibited in many national and international museums and galleries and is represented in a number of significant art collections.