"Scen XVIII"
Signed Johanna Karlsson on label verso. Executed in 2021. Plaster, paper, pigment, metal wire, oak and artglass, 43.5 x 33.7 x 19.5 cm.
Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm.
Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Market Art Fair, Liljevalchs, Stockholm, 17-19 September 2021.
Gallery Magnus Karlsson's presentation of the artist at Market Art Fair 2021:
Johanna Karlsson (b. 1968) lives and works in Stockholm. She is educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (1991-1997). Johanna Karlsson constructs meticulously detailed portrayals of landscapes in her dioramas, using a mixed media technique including copper and silver wire, paper, textile, pigment and plaster. She takes fragments of nature into a cultural context, and the result is a laboratory-like presentation with an emotional load - a personal and poetic natural science. Johanna Karlsson does not add any special symbolic or thematic narratives to her nature studies. They belong to the larger story of all thing's birth, construction and destruction. The time spent making the works becomes synonymous with its content.
A new catalogue with images of the works and an essay written by Swedish writer Tomas Bannerhed is published in connection with the presentation.
From Tomas Bannerhed's text on Johanna Karlsson:
Soldering and gluing, modelling and painting are her methods. And reducing, naturally, changing the scale and perspective, which, together with the presentation in glass displays, enhances the impression of nature as object, something mankind must relate to, something we can plunder, or live with in harmony.