Bacchus, 2026

Martin Gustafsson

Martin Gustafsson: My name is Martin Gustafsson, and I am a Swedish artist based between Stockholm and London. My painting Bacchus, which is showing here in the House of Nisaba, is based on an etching called The Bacchanal with a Wine Vat made by Daniel Hopfer around 1520. Hopfer used a painting by Mantegna as the source for his composition. Many prints were made in this way to popularize and spread images of famous paintings.

It is the first moment in art history where the idea of art could reach a wider audience. Much like how at that time the printing press would distribute new knowledge and by doing so changed the world into how we now know it. I found Hopfer’s print in my research for hidden queer moments in older paintings and images.

I look for situations and emotional compositions that awaken a certain shared knowledge in my body, a knowledge that I have come to recognize and this as an affinity or kinship which travels outside of time as we usually see it. I was looking at this print at an auction house and started to feel that I knew all the men standing around that well, drunk and lustful, dancing and cavorting.

There are moments of tenderness in this picture, but also bravado and erotic tension. Drunk putti are either asleep or leaving the frame, having already done their job of inducing love into the picture. It is a Dionysian situation, an orgiastic dream which was a fantasy in 1520 as much as is this one today.

In this work, I show you how I look at the world through my colours. It is my fantasy and memory of having been in places and situations as this one, and the colours I use are there to heighten the emotional drama that the composition holds and hides. It is painted quickly, with paint that floats on the surface to gradually coagulate into a picture that seems to continually change as we are looking at it, in a similar way to how the world seems to change when intoxication from love or wine sets in.

When I was a very young man in Gothenburg, there was a club called Bacchus. This painting is also a tribute to that club and the people I knew there.