Jockum Nordström's idiosyncratic two-dimensional artworks tell open-ended stories in which a peculiar mix of rakish dandies, musicians, animals, architectural renderings, and modernist furniture coexist harmoniously, though the bustling activity is occasionally shadowed by a slight unease (what one critic called a "grim Nordic humor"). The specific confluence of his interests—bawdy humor, Victoriana, music, storytelling—is unique among contemporary artists, yet his works possess a familiarity by dint of his synthesis of material culled from diverse sources, from art history to children's book illustrations, album covers to magazines. These amalgamations, combined with his hyperactive imagination, take the form of collages and drawings. Yet Nordström's preoccupations and techniques resonate more with contemporary painters than with other artists working in his preferred mediums.

Nordström charts his own course, seizing upon outmoded styles to construct fantasy worlds, and in this regard his work is closest to that of German artist Kai Althoff, another solitary traveler through the world of contemporary art. Althoff, whose diverse practice consists of drawings, watercolors, paintings, sculptures, and videos, among other mediums, shares Nordström's fascination with turn-of-the-last-century figures and the erotic frisson underlying social ritual. Althoff's art likewise possesses a narrative thrust, though his stories—the comingöout tale of a teenage boy; the life of Jürgen Bartsch, a pedophile serial killer who scandalized 1960s Germany; and, most recently, Biblical scenes—are frequently articulated over the course of multiple works. The artists share formal affinities as well. Space is almost always shallow (more on this in a moment) and is subject to torquing and distortion; the characters in these environments do not cast shadows, as if they were cutouts (which Althoff makes and affixes to agllery walls or sets amid installations); both are expert draftsmen whose works often possss a faux-naïve line quality that implies a connection to folk- and outsider-art traditions. Their offbeat works use "vernacular illustration... as a means to examine cultural traditions and reignite old myths or fashion new ones."

Many artists who make collages treat scissors as a sculptural tool, akin to a carving trowel or chisel, and remove elements from magazine spreads and advertisements. It can be said that these works favor form over narrative, and that this mode is dominant, or at least ascendant, in contemporary art. Dutch artist Amie Dicke, British artist Angus Fairhurst, and New York-based Christian Holstad all excise some or all of the human bodies depicted in the magazine spreads, pornography, and advertising imagery they work with. Dicke leaves behind a network of filigreed lines that look like veins or lace; the latter two lay multiple images atop one another. But Nordström's collages are additive rather than subtractive, piling figures into their environments. He resuscitates an out-of-favor tradition epitomized by the art of Romare Bearden.

Bearden's antic collages and sketch-like ink drawings, filled to bursting with the life of Harlem Renaissance-era New York (which he experienced during adolescence) and the other places he called home, are an important antecedent for Nordström's art. The artists share a flat, graphic style and a propensity for stuffing multiple narratives into each work, creating busy (but not cramped) scenes-modern, secular versions of Byzantine icons. Bearden was preoccupied with street life, ritual, and music, subjects that can all be found to varying degrees in Nordström's oeuvre. Bearden's Three Folk Musicians (1967)—a mosaic of tiny paper bits—presents straight-on views of the eponymous music makers, two with guitars and one with a banjo. His rendering of their hands, clumsily schematic and flat against the instruments, is very similar to the guitarist pictured in Nordström's For Once Playing Guitar (2001). Bearden's Thank You...For F.U.M.L. (Funking Up My Life) (1978), made for the cover of an album by the trumpeter Donald Byrd, can lead us on a free-associative riff out of the realm of fine art altogether. Nordström plays bass guitar and is a jazz aficionado; Byrd's Thank You... was released on Elektra, but he was a longtime member of the Blue Note Records stable. Many classic Blue Note album covers feature the slightly askew geometries that crop up in Nordström's less representational compositions; compare the gridlike cover of Tina Brooks's True Blue (1960) with his collage The Coachmen (2002). Many others, like Byrd's earlier Byrd in Flight (1960) or Grant Green's Idle Moments (1963), are horizontally bisected—another of Nordström's signature techniques, which the artist also likens to two frames of a passing filmstrip—with a photograph below and dynamic typographic treatment above.

Nordström's creation of boxlike spaces to house his characters—even scenes set outdoors occasionally have boundary markers, such as the split-rail fence in There Is a Mischief Brewing (2001)—brings us back to the realm of contemporary art. Many painters now construct these tableaux-like environments, akin to the sets used by marionette puppets or dioramas as a natural history museum, in their work. Los Angeles-based Brian Calvin's cartoonish slackers populate shallow interiors when not hanging out at the beach. German artist Christoph Ruckhaberle paints sharply delineated clumps of natty teenagers, often in prep-school attire, lounging about in bedrooms and kitchens; the enormous painting Guitar Band (2004) is his take on one of Nordström's favorite subjects. An even larger number of painters, including an emerging "Leipzig school" in Germany, incorporate collagelike technique into the production of their canvases. The foremost of this group is Neo Rauch, whose jarring, quasi-surrealist juxtapositions are an updated take on Soviet Socialist Realism. Matthias Weischer's recent depopulated interiors and Martin Eder's bizarre conflations of innocence and horror appear similarly pieced together. Much closer to home, Karin Mamma Anderson combines many of these techniques in the service of equally fantastic imagery. In the United States, the connection to Nordström's style of collage is even more explicit: San Francisco-based Chris Johanson and New York artist Jules de Balincourt use x-acto knives and stencils along with brushes to create their neo-hippie idylls, cityscapes, and charmingly awkward portraits. They, like Nordström, distill a maelstrom of activity and inspiration into distinctive, quirky fables that blur past and present, interiors and landscapes, and fact and fiction.