Jan Stenmark Swedish, b. 1949

Jan Stenmark, born in 1949, is a Swedish visual artist who works with collages. Many of his images consist of newspaper clippings where the text beneath the image gives it a completely new and often absurd meaning.

Stenmark is not primarily a comic creator in the conventional sense of the word, nor does he claim to be one. Instead, he can perhaps be considered more broadly as a cartoonist (although the images are usually collages rather than drawings). Parallels can be drawn with the American artist Gary Larson, who also creates cartoons consisting of a single panel with an absurd caption below. (It should be noted, however, that both Stenmark and Larson occasionally use the comic strip format, i.e., two or more images in sequence.) Stenmark has also been published in Swedish comic magazines, side by side with other cartoonists and comic artists.

Stenmark got the idea to start working with collages when he saw some old issues of "Allt i Hemmet" (a Swedish home and interior design magazine) at his brother's house and was fascinated by the aesthetics of the 1950s and the falseness of the images. "This doesn't feel right. It was like some kind of facade, and it fascinated me," Stenmark said in an interview with Aftonbladet. Many of his current images are based precisely on the contrast between what is shown in the image and the accompanying text.

Among his inspirations, Stenmark mentions the pessimistic Romanian writer E.M. Cioran and the Monty Python team.

Since his debut in the early 1990s, Stenmark has become increasingly popular with the general public, and one contributing factor may be his publication in Aftonbladet (a Swedish daily newspaper).