The layering of pictures in box frames adds a framed symmetry and contemporary look to Cullberg’s interiors. Here, works by Julia Rosa Clark flank Cullberg’s No. 5 (2002), Sphere (2014) and Stripes (2007).
The layering of pictures in box frames adds a framed symmetry and contemporary look to Cullberg’s interiors. Here, works by Julia Rosa Clark flank Cullberg’s No. 5 (2002), Sphere (2014) and Stripes (2007).
Some of the most beautiful paintings in this book are by the artist Tom Cullberg, a 42-year-old Swede and a painter, draughtsman and printmaker, who came to study at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in his twenties and never left. His house in Tamboerskloof in Cape Town, in which he lives with his partner and their daughter and a young son from a previous relationship, is part of a mid-Victorian terrace that, in the 1970s, was renovated by a group of architects and rid of its pokey period rooms. Now it has a contemporary look and feel and while the interior still follows the shape of the old building, it seems spacious and new and there’s a refreshing clarity about it. There’s an attractive, uncomplicated aesthetic at work here which is somehow reflected in Cullberg’s paintings, much of his work revealing ‘who I am and why I’m here, what I see and how I experience the world, in broad terms,’ he says.
When Tom arrived, the house was a blank canvas, its beautiful structure filled with openness and light inside, making it reminiscent of those spare, restrained Scandinavian houses. It feels quite modern to him now. Having grown up playing with Lego and, later, working with a builder renovating apartments, he likes getting his hands dirty. ‘I enjoy the process of making,’ he says. There’s a builder in him somewhere, it seems, ready to get stuck into the construction of a room in the attic space of this house. And yet, always interested in architecture and its rationale, there’s also that cerebral desire to give structure to chaos, to create a balance; you see it in his work – in particular the line paintings in his abstract ‘Periphery’ series where, recalling the clean and precise grids of Mondrian, the horizontals of Agnes Martin, the perfect order of the design emerges organically from the blurry, tactile rendering of the paint depicting them. It’s almost as though the vitality of the colour is breaking through the strict discipline of the uncompromising lines. The dialogue here replicates his experience of his surroundings. And colours also have to work together; if one breaks the harmony it has to go.
‘And yet,’ says Cullberg, ‘you have to take risks as well. It’s not only about making something beautiful or making something pleasing. It’s also about creating a tension so that something interesting emerges.’
Having acquired the shell of this house, its appeal lay in the fact that he was able to mould it into something that would make it his, giving it a history. It didn’t have to be an old house, however. Cullberg loves modernist houses – although now even they could be almost 100 years old. And he’s constructed a history regardless of the building’s private narrative. The building has given him enough detail to be able to spin his own stories, to create the kinds of quiet memories that lurk in his work, in particular his house paintings. Viewed from afar and often at night, you’re able to look into them like a voyeur peering into somebody else’s life. You know how it is: ‘It’s dark and you see a little light in the window or you see someone sitting there. Or the building’s completely empty and then I wonder what its history is, so I guess at it, even invent it.’ That’s what he’s doing with the house that he lives in. He’s making it his. He’s giving it a history.
Cullberg’s home is full of books, many of them featuring in his book portraits: one of them, My Voice Will Now Come From a Different Place (2009), is on the wall as you enter the front door. These paintings depict the covers of books. When you look, you think you recognise old favourites until, on closer inspection, an altered reality emerges. For example, at first this painting seems to feature The Red Sea Sharks from the Tintin series, but it turns out to be about holidays with his friend Pieter Hugo on the Cape West Coast where there’s lots of crayfishing in little boats. There’s a bit of his own private history here too: a cover featuring a Klippo lawnmower refers to the Swedish ritual of mowing the lawn every few days in summer. ‘My mom has a house up in the north where I go every year. Because of the rain, the grass grows quickly in summer so you have to mow the lawn every three days or so. This is about my relationship with my mother.’ So each book has a story he builds on: ‘It can be a shortcut into a person’s memories, senses and experiences,’ he says. These lovely book portraits are quietly electric. And they’re full of hidden surprises, just like his house.
There’s a refreshing palette in Cullberg’s latest works. Here, Tower is flanked by (top right) Okapi Knife and (bottom left) Whispering Land (all 2014). ‘How I work with colour feels more South African than Swedish. It’s richer and earthier, and the colours are more vibrant.’
My Voice Will Now Come From a Different Place hangs by the entrance. It dominates the space and the oblong images and narratives filled with detail keep the viewer coming back for another look. To the right, the kitchen.
He’s a reader with fictional preoccupations that find their way into his art. Shelves of books fill walls of his living room. The organised layering of his own work along the top of the bookcase offers a glimpse of successive painterly concerns.
The house may have an open-plan design, but the spaces in it are neatly compartmentalised by function and occupation – as though the architects, and Cullberg, felt the need for added form through spatial distinctions and separations. A range of mid-20th-century low-slung modern furniture recalls his Scandinavian roots.