- published: 13 Feb 2015
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Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1840. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable, and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
Tobias Bernstrup (born 1970 in Gothenburg, Sweden) is a contemporary artist working with videos, interactive works, live performances and electronic music. He received an MFA from Royal College University of Fine Arts Stockholm in 1998, where he also met up with artist colleague Palle Torsson.
Tobias Bernstrup belongs to a group of visual artists who produce music and perform it, and who consider this process as part of their practice as visual artists. Using the visual language of pop culture, video games, sci-fi, classicism and gothic noir, he has created a stage persona with gender-crossing live performances dressed in elaborate costumes of shiny rubber and heavy make up. In videos and animations often inhabited by his digital alter ego/Avatar and in live performances where the artist dresses as a computer game character, he raises questions about representation of identity, the body and physical space in both virtual and non-virtual realities, closely linked to critical ideas of irrealism and simulacra.