Niklas Nydahl was born on the outskirts of Malmö in the south of Sweden in 1979. As an autodidact he learned mainly through experimentation, books, museum visits and from his artist grandfather. He has been painting since his early 20s, and his earlier work could be described as informal and intuitive expressionism, where the image was the result of a communication between chance, unconscious and conscious. Nydahl often felt confined within the latest trends of art and having to live up to the soulless art dogmas of the time. He never felt at home in the prevailing ironic and post-modern ideals within the institutions and so gradually embraced the aesthetic and philosophical ideals of Romanticism. Nydahl mentions cinematic, musical, literary and painterly influences in Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Schubert, Byron, Böcklin, Turner and Whistler, without fear of being deemed outdated or even reactionary. Since 2019 he has been working with predominantly small formats and in watercolor, from having worked with monumental sizes and oil in the past. Artist’s website: www.artmajeur.com/niklas_nydahl