A well-known children's book and newspaper illustrator, Nordström unites discordant images and styles, working mostly with pencil but also with watercolor and collage. He places buildings drawn with the elegance of architectural renderings in landscapes that resemble folk art, populated with an array of figures engaged in acts from the mundane to the profane. He creates boxlike spaces to house his characters and seems to delight in depictions of bourgeois life gone strangely, if not savagely, awry. Nordström's style is unique, mixing references to naive art, eighteenth– and nineteenth–century vernacular illustration, and the late work of Symbolists James Ensor and Edvard Munch. His odd juxtapositions also sound a Surrealist note: a bucolic suburban landscape and high–heeled nudes peppered among society gentlemen in tuxedos bring the artist's quirky imagination to the page.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art , p. 204.
