Website with Selected works 2007-2009,
Biography and News
News
Still image from Advertising My Expression, shown in excerpts at
Die, Die, Die, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (9/6-27/6) and previously shown in it's full length at Bez Domny, Gothenburg.
Read more here or go here to watch the work.
Short artistic statement
I create artworks on the basis of phenomenons, persons, representations, products etc. Through a close research of these subjects I try to discover hidden connections, additional meanings and attempt to link trivial fragments that can clarify the larger social context.
In general my pieces are made from already existing images, texts and objects.
I simply perform a reconstruction or a forwarding of those forms, adding or subtracting elements to the work.
Bio
Born 1980 in Uppsala, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
Education:
2003-2007 MFA at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm
2002-2003 Valand School of Fine Arts, Gothenburg
2001-2002 Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Stockholm
Selected Exhibitions:
2009 Die, Die, Die, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow
2009 Textival at Bez Domny, Gotheburg
2008 Almost perfect cubes, City Museum, Gothenburg
2007 Five minutes to midnight, Art Academy, Stockholm
2007 Sideshow Kaufman, Gallery Mejan, Stockholm
2006 4 Play, Regeringsgatan 30, Stockholm
2004 Spring Show, Gallery Mejan, Stockholm
2004 Geggan, Gallery Titanik, Åbo, Finland
2003 Geggan, Bondegatan 47, Stockholm
2003 Geggan, Soc, Stockholm
2003 Mot allmänheten, Kulturhuset, Stockholm
2002 Spring Show, Gallery Rotor 2, Gothenburg
2002 Ingång, Gallery Rotor, Gothenburg
2002 Football – we against them, Vita Havet, Konstfack, Stockholm
Sideshow Kaufman, 2007
View publication in pdf format
With the project Sideshow Kaufman, (2007) I tried to reassemble a phenomenon that in the stream of information adopted a very complicated structure. The piece traces the remains and the representations of Andy Kaufman, a mythologized american comedian who died in 1984. Kaufman’s legacy continues to transform and create endless representations of itself and produce a maze of truth and make believe.
Active during the 70ties and early 80ties for example in TV and stand-up, Kaufman was a playful, uncompromising and radical part of comedy. Lynne Margulies was Kaufman’s girlfriend the last two years of his life and even though they were never married she is often referred to as his “widow”.
With products, events and movies etc, she continues to work with Andy Kaufman’s legacy and so does many others. During the first years of the 21st Century Lynne planned an event which took it’s aesthetics from the American sideshow circus. The event was never realized but priot to that Lynne made a poster for the circus. It was a montage picturing a bannerline, which in the sideshow circus was a row of painted canvases mounted on a stand. The bannerline functioned as an entrance but also as a display of the different acts you could find inside the tent. Lynne also made twelve sketches for the bannerline and some of these were pasted into the montage.
In the twelve different sketches she comment on herself, Andy and the myths that surround Andy’s career mixed in with classic sideshow motifs.
In a collaboration with Lynne Margulies, I compiled the twelwe images that was made for the event and recreated the presentation that Lynne outlined in the montage. The piece also consists of a text that gathers a number of different examples of how Andy Kaufman’s identity is managed and formed in the representations created by friends, Hollywood, fans and his family.
Advertising My Expression, 2009
View the publication in pdf format
Advertising My Expression is compiled from recordings of advertising agency websites. The work chronicles and attempts to visualize various economic, creative and aesthetic structures in advertising. Structures ranging from global corporations down to the creative individual.
The world of advertising is organized through several major gobal holding companies that own global advertising networks of different sizes.
Advertising My Expression examine these networks and their somewhat clichéd notions of creativity and constantly moving visual presentations, that changes according to geographical location and position inside the network hierarchy.
Also documented in the work are various advertising agency’s creative side projects and other forms of self-representation that seemingly borders with art or other cultural practices.
The work consists of two parts, a video projection and a publication that contains the text captions seen in the video work.
The Private Collection of Steve Martin, 2007
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This was a psuedo biographical work, which linked seemingly trivial fragments together into a new critical reading of the person.
I created a subjective biography based on mediated information.
The project’s starting point was the comedian Steve Martin, his art collection and the exhibition catalog and other printed matter that was made in connection with an exhibition of the collection at the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery in Las Vegas in 2001.
This was the one time he showed parts of the collection in public.
Steve Martin has collected contemporary and modernist painting since he started making money in show business. His collection contain mostly american early 20th century painting but besides that anything from Picasso to Hockney.
The Private Collection of Steve Martin consists of an enlarged copy of the exhibition flyer and a text that was placed on the wall beside the large flyer.
The text is assembled from various quoted texts orginating from books, articles etc. about Martin, his art collection and the exhibition in Las Vegas, mixed with texts written by myself. These texts put together shape a story
about Steve Martin’s dual thoughts about art and comedy, his attitude towards women, his constant projections of beauty
and seriousity upon art, in contrast to his playfulness, manifested for example in his stand up and the childish and lighthearted pranks that in his youth ended up as works of art.
