Hawk Alfredson

Hawk Alfredson (born Nils Håkan Anders Alfredsson on September 24, 1960) is an international artist known for symbolic, surrealistic oil paintings with a Northern European quality in tone and method. Alfredson's paintings do not fall into a single category but instead cross over and combine Surrealism and Magic Realism as well as Symbolist and Fantastic art; a strong emphasis on classical painting technique is a major feature of his work.

Alfredson is a "Pansurrealist" according to Terrance Lindall in his essay What's New in the Surreal World?

Early life and education

Alfredson was born in Örebro, Sweden, to a Finnish mother and a Swedish father. Early in life, Alfredson's parents recognized their young son's talent and, after Alfredson announced at age seven that he would become an artist, his father taught the young boy the basics of oil painting.

In his early teens, Alfredson was submitting caricatures and cartoons to Swedish newspapers and magazines; the Swedish edition of Mad Magazine was one of the first to publish Alfredson's images. Sixteen-year-old Alfredson first exhibited his work professionally in a group show in Sölvesborg at Nicolaigården. The same year, he left home to attend Fetco's School of Fine Arts (now Konstskolan i Stockholm) and later took advanced classes in formal painting at Pernby's Målarskola in Stockholm.

Early career In 1980, Alfredson sold his first painting UFO Sverige Aktuellt to a Swedish magazine; it subsequently was shown at an exhibition of UFO artwork in the Köpings Museum; the commissioned work depicted a UFO in the sky with two aliens standing below. Within a few months, the artist had earned the title "The darling of the New York underground scene" with artwork in twenty shows during the first year after his arrival.

Alfredson's art career was given a boost in 1998 when Thelma Golden of the Whitney Museum curated one of his pieces into the juried show "Art as Spectacle" at the Katonah Museum. The exhibition, labeled the year's "most prestigious" by the New York Times, was considered a tri-state event. During the same year, while exhibiting in a gallery in Brooklyn, Alfredson met photographer Mia Hanson who later became his wife. In 1998, the couple lived and worked first in California, then in Stockholm, and in 2001 returned to Manhattan to take up residence in the Hotel Chelsea.

Living and painting in the Hotel Chelsea

For the next decade, Alfredson and his wife lived in New York's Chelsea Hotel where Alfredson produced and displayed as many as fifty pieces at a time in the hotel's stairwell and hallways. Hawk and his wife appeared on part of the "Hotel Secrets" series that marked the restructuring of the Hotel Chelsea and removal of the artistic element. The couple left in 2010 along with other long-time residents.

Artwork Since Alfredson's work often depicts images taken from "the strange visionary periods between sleeping and waking," the artist is associated with the Pansurrealism movement. Dream-like environments and people form the basis of his representational work, with symbols and detailed patterns—"circlings" and complex Fibonacci spiral motifs—dominant in the non-objective paintings. Daevid Allen's University Of Errors "Hawk Alfredson Retrospective", Charles Street Gallery, New York NY, 2013. "Esoteric Kitsch Part 2", Limner Gallery, Hudson NY, 2012.

Artwork for books Alfredson's images have been selected as cover and insert illustrations for several international works of fiction.

Artwork for music releases Alfredson's artwork has appeared on numerous album covers

The documentary Chelsea on the Rocks, directed by Abel Ferrara in 2008, features Alfredson speaking about his experiences while living and painting at New York's Hotel Chelsea.