Tútob Mingyúr
It was a pleasure then
Kabinettet
15.09.22 – 16.10.22

It's not a particularly well-kept secret that Tútob Mingyúr wastes a lot of his time writing art criticism under the pseudonym “Tommy Olsson”, so we shouldn’t act as if something is what it isn’t. It was a pleasure then consolidates and takes stock of the work done most recently (2020–2022), made almost without exception on paper and using mainly watercolor, but, as with everything else, following the principle “anything goes and everything usually does”. An unstable psychogeography is drawn, via an insistence on actual geographic points (Jan Mayen, Nigeria, Granada, etc.), ambitions about establishing a pirate colony, and a genuine fixation with Nidaros Cathedral as beginning to end: A landscape in motion, with equally specific wildlife (adders, koala bears, mummins, etc.), but essentially a departure lounge for different types of re-birth. Reference points are many, thresholds crossed underway innumerable.

From the artist’s notebook, dated April 2021, one can read:

“So there I lay, late evening in the dark, on my back with arms out, Christ-like, out on the floor in the middle of Nidaros Cathedral, with the rose window upside down when I look back, when this female voice comes from the loudspeaker and says “some journeys begin with a return” and I knew it was time. Not that much, but it was time. The best time.”

Utrecht, September 7, 2022
Lennart Sundin

 Tútob Mingyúr (Tommy Olsson), b. 1963 in Lindesberg, Sweden, lives and works in Trondheim. He was educated at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam and Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, in addition to Creative Curating, Bergen Art Academy (now Faculty of Art, Music, and Design, University of Bergen). As an artist, he has in forty years been active in a range of media in the music, sound, and visual-art field. As a curator, critic, and author he continues to be an important voice in the Norwegian art scene.