Artist: Lisa Jonasson

Galleri Magnus Karlsson presents Lisa Jonasson’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition Reality Trip features collages and assemblages in painted, cut paper and wood made in recent years, as well as a series of new sculptures and objects in bronze and mixed media.

Lisa Jonasson works intuitively with her images and compositions. A process where an initial statement nourishes what comes next and the final result cannot be predicted until the last piece has fallen into place. The finished works contain large quantities of small, painted and cut pieces of paper, which are joined together to form a complex and teeming imagery. The meticulous collage technique she uses is a complicating factor, a necessary friction and slowness. By concentrating on the hand, the scissors and how they interact with the paper, thoughts can be limited and chiselled out. Not everything is possible, just one thing at a time.

The detailed and enigmatic images can be experienced as winding labyrinths or rebuses. Imaginative and figurative but with a broken narrative. Mysterious and open to interpretation but at the same time full of recognition and precise in their execution. Perhaps life is portrayed here in a broad sense – from its emergence and development through the lens of a microscope, via everyday relationships and endeavours, to a zoomed-out perspective where we are only an insignificant part of an infinite universe?

What you can’t understand you can still experience, the picture you’re making will contain things you can’t grasp. I’m not even talking about something subconscious, it’s the fluid causality of stories. Events acquire meaning afterwards, in the same way images acquire their meaning and starting point in retrospect.

Images are like music, everything is improvisation. Improvisation is a human method, to jam with life. All pictures are playful. Sometimes I am so serious that I almost tie myself in knots, and yet it is playful. Playfulness, improvisation, doesn’t have to be easy – without determination, nothing is nothing.

As long as there are eyes, images will be read, and each time in a new way. Imagination is perishable. Humans are perishable. We peer out through consciousness, we can only know as much as the peephole allows.

- Lisa Jonasson

Lisa Jonasson (b. 1978) is educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (1999–2004), and made a big impact with her text-based posters in connection with a student exhibition at Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003. The works combined humour, social engagement, provocation and a wayward poetry. She received the Maria Bonnier Dahlin scholarship and for a few years organised a biennial in her own name, The Lisa Jonasson Biennial, at various locations in Stockholm. The linguistic element has remained in Lisa Jonasson’s work, but the texts have developed into comic strips and later into wordless paper collages. In 2012, Lisa Jonasson presented her patience-testing paper cut-out collages in the solo exhibition Man’s Inner in Average at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden. The technique and theme were developed in the solo exhibitions The Circle Must End and Act and Meaning at Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2015 and 2019. Here, the collages were given three-dimensional parts and clearer compositions. In 2021, the acclaimed exhibition Gestus (together with Matti Kallioinen) was shown at Uppsala konstmuseum, Sweden. In recent years, she has worked on a number of public commissions before returning with the exhibition Reality Trip at the gallery. Lisa Jonasson is represented in private collections in Sweden and internationally, including Moderna Museet and Malmö Art Museum, Sweden.