Larsen Warner is pleased to present Overlapse, a solo exhibition by Canadian artist Mike Swaney (b.1978) the artists first solo exhibition in Sweden.
Swaney’s distinctive style and visual language is at once naive and deliberate, playful and incisive. Much like artistic contemporaries such as Eddie Martinez, Robert Nava, Jordy Kerwick and Katherine Bernhardt, Swaney embraces a consciously childlike aesthetic using direct mark-making, flattened forms, and playful subject matter; subverting traditional painterly expectations through a deliberately unpolished visual language that speaks to intuition, immediacy, and a rejection of academic pretension.
Swaney embraces spontaneity, experimentation, and raw expression, with his bold use of colour and sophisticated layered surfaces recalling folk traditions and the immediacy of drawing, while simultaneously evoking the coded symbols of pop culture and digital expression. His work can be seen in the lineage of the CoBrA movement and Art Brut in particular, whose shared values of intuitive creation and individual vision being of particular influence on Swaney.
Overlapse presents a body of work that revisits ideas first explored by the artist in 2012. Featuring repeated motifs of flowers, plant pots and the human eye, the series is anchored in a process of inversion. Swaney begins each work by sketching and laying down colour while the canvas is upside down, only later turning it right side up to complete the composition. This deliberate disorientation generates paintings that carry both the inprint of their inverted beginnings and the clarity of their final resolution. Combing gestural abstraction with bold figuration, these paintings feel impulsive, spontaneous, and emotionally direct, creating a carefully balanced visual chaos that feels both overwhelming and joyful.
Alongside these new works, the exhibition also includes paintings from Swaney’s ongoing and iconic Finger Family series. This series is a vivid, playful exploration of identity, kinship, and the absurdity of representation. Swaney creates a cast of hand-shaped figures, often with cartoonish faces, exaggerated features, and textured, patchwork surfaces. The hands become both characters and vessels, standing in for a kind of universal family unit, but also for the act of making itself, fingers being the most direct tools of the artist.
With compositions that feel both naive and ritualistic and leaning into repetition and exaggeration, Swaney’s paintings evoke a child’s obsessive rendering of their favourite things. His maximalist, non-linear approach to painting resists traditional narratives and invites open interpretation, positioning Swaney’s work within a broader conversation about authorship, accessibility, and the hierarchies of taste within contemporary art.
