Artist: Johanna Karlsson

Galleri Magnus Karlsson presents Johanna Karlsson’s tenth solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition Anatomy of Nature features a series of reliefs and sculptures created over the past year.

At first glance, Johanna Karlsson’s sculptures appear to be almost exact reproductions of nature. Carefully selected excerpts and passages from inconspicuous but evocative places and details. Compositions taken directly from reality, but placed in a different context. The arrangements are so convincible that, as a viewer, you sometimes forget that you are looking at a constructed world. By lifting nature out of its original setting, she forces us to observe and refect. We sense the presence of the hand, a gentle treatment of the material and the infinite choices in colour and expression that the artist has faced during the process.

The muted palette is subdued and consists of earthy tones. Small excursions in colour recur as subtle accents. In the new works, the imagery has been sharpened and painting plays a more prominent role. The ground is sometimes steeply sloping, like a stage set. The works oscillate between representation and materiality, between objective realism and dramatic simplification. Karlsson consistently uses simple materials such as copper and silver wire, paper, textiles, pigments and plaster.

Johanna Karlsson has worked with nature as a theme throughout her artistry, but her sculptures are usually created from made up motifs. She says of her work: ”Of course, I use real nature too, trotting around and getting ideas, but I rarely try to depict it. I see my work as a kind of translation, like creating my own worlds.”

Karlsson’s approach to natural science is personal and poetic. Nature appears not only as an external landscape, but also as an inner world. In these scenes, the motifs become a reflection of ourselves, while also carrying a larger narrative. The exhibition is a study of the anatomy of nature, focusing on the peripheral. We encounter a nature that is both foreign and familiar – charged with the concerns of our time, but also with longing and hope.

Johanna Karlsson (b. 1968) lives and works in Stockholm. She studied at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm (1991–1997). She has exhibited regularly at galleries and institutions in Sweden and internationally since the late 1990s. In 2024, she was one of the contemporary artists featured in the major Caspar David Friedrich exhibition Art for a New Age at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany. In the same year, her work was also shown at National Museum, Stockholm, in the exhibition The Romantic Eye. She is currently featured in the drawing exhibition Another Morning at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.