Nils Nilsson Skum, 1951
A comprehensive presentation of the Sámi artist Nils Nilsson Skum (1872–1951), featuring drawings and paintings from around 1910 until 1950.
Few artists have portrayed the Lapland landscape and the lives and living conditions of the Sámi people like Skum. With close attention to detail, he depicts life in the mountains and working with the reindeer during their migration. Each reindeer has been given its own character and its own posture, often against the backdrop of the mountain landscape. He had a great sense of pictorial composition, and the reindeer herds have often been given an almost monumental form.
Skum worked mainly in pencil and chalk on a small scale, but also produced a number of oil paintings. His major breakthrough as an artist came with the book Same sita – lappbyn, which was published in 1938 and depicts the eight seasons of nomadic life in illustrations and text.
Bildmuseet displays around 60 works by Skum. These have been borrowed from five different collections, including those of Kiruna Municipality and LKAB.
The exhibition launches the two-year project Sámi art, past and present, initiated by Bildmuseet at Umeå University. The project begins during Sámi Week (‘Ubmejen Biejvieh’) in March 2003, and continues in 2004 with an exhibition of contemporary Sámi art. The project has been supported by the Swedish Arts Council and the Ministry of Agriculture.
