The Art of Simon Stalenhag

Simon Stålenhag, born January 20, 1984, is a Swedish artist, computer game developer and musician, famous for his science fiction paintings of retro-futuristic landscapes. He was educated in game design at Futuregames Academy and is resident at Kungsholmen in Stockholm.

Stålenhag grew up on the Mälar Islands outside of Stockholm and started as a child to draw birds, inspired by landscape painters like Gunnar Brusewitz and Lars Jonsson. As an adult, he returned to the moorland landscape together with a childhood friend and their fantasies about a Swedish 1980s that had never been transformed into Swedish landscapes where familiar features, which in detail depicted old car models, were mixed with robots, flying craft and large research centers.

When the United States online magazine The Verge published Stålenhags landscape paintings in August 2013, the images were shared over 50,000 times, as described in Svenska Dagbladet as a "Swedish viral success." The pictures were discovered by Simon Staalenhag first sharing them on Facebook without any plans that they would be shown to any major audience. The landscape paintings depicting "Swedish cultural landscape from the 80s and 90s populated with robots and dinosaurs" was presented as an art book entitled Ur Notice, by the publisher of the Free League in September 2014.

Stålenhag produces its paintings on computer using a digital drawing board in a style that mimics oil or acrylic painting.

Stålenhag, together with childhood friend Tommy Salomonsson, creates the game Pixeltruss, which created the 16-bit platform game Ripple Dot Zero: a free game available on the web.

Stålenhag has made several book covers, including the short novels in MIX publisher's digital storytelling project After Stormen: Johan Rings "The Dark Spot", Caroline L. Jensen's "Slukhål" and Solja Krapus "If You Need Me". He has also illustrated the Natural History Museum's permanent exhibition Fossil and evolution.

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