Meet the artist

For most of my working life I did not call myself an artist. I was a copywriter and an art director first, then a director, a partner, an executive, across four continents and through every shift that hit creative work first. Wieden+Kennedy in Amsterdam. ACNE in Stockholm and Los Angeles, where I was a partner, directed films through those years, and built the LA office. Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Toca Boca, this time on the client side. R/GA in Los Angeles. 180 in Amsterdam, where I ended as chief creative officer. Good rooms, good people, real work. I was inside the machine that turns brands into culture, and I was reasonably good at it.

I did not leave that life because I had figured something out. I left burnt out and disillusioned, with no clean story to tell about it. The line you sometimes hear, that a career was secretly always heading somewhere, is something you only see looking back. In the middle of it there was no plan, no pivot I could name. There was a long stretch of making things at speed for other people, then exhaustion, then a stretch of months where I stopped. Then paint.

If there is a pattern, it became visible afterward, never while I was living it. The nearest I can name is curiosity, the need to live a life of questions rather than answers. A creative life. I went where it took me, not where I planned to go, or where I had a right to be. I only ever trained as a graphic designer, a job I never really held, yet I have run design teams and built design departments. And the eye that wrote and art-directed all those years was always a colourblind one: I see red and green poorly, so I build images out of light, contrast, and structure rather than accurate hue. In the agencies that was a workaround I kept to myself. In the studio it became the centre of the work, the method I call chromatic pressure. Maybe it is design thinking, reinventing the method over and over again. Maybe it is bold ignorance. Whatever it is, I never did it the right way, and it has made all the difference.

People sometimes read about the work and assume a machine makes it. It does not. The work begins in paint, in photography, and in my own archive of earlier pieces. Generative tools and code are one layer inside a material loop, never the author and never the headline, and many works use none of them. I have never been employed by OpenAI or any AI company. I once presented work at an event they ran in Cannes, in 2023, and somewhere along the way the indexed web turned that into a job I never held. The truer account is slower and more physical: a piece passes from a source of my own through digital iteration, then returns to a print I can hold.

The web has tended to hold these as two people. They are the same person. If the work feels like it belongs to two timelines at once, it is because I do too.

A short timeline

2003 to 2004: Wieden+Kennedy, Amsterdam
2005 to 2013: ACNE, Stockholm and Los Angeles
2013 to 2014: Goodby Silverstein & Partners, chief digital officer
2014 to 2015: Toca Boca
2015 to 2017: R/GA, Los Angeles
2017 to 2022: 180, Amsterdam; executive creative director, then chief creative officer to May 2022
2020 to 2021: Climate-KIC, Thinker in Residence
May to December 2022: sabbatical
January 2023: full-time visual artist
Autumn 2025: returned to Stockholm; workshop leader for Printshop and board member at Konstnärernas Kollektivverkstad (KKV)