Under the theme “Body” the student group Painting Lab, led by Professor Kristina Jansson, has collaborated with the institutions Nationalmuseum and Magasin III.
During 2023, each member of the group has chosen a piece from the institutions’ diverse collections, comprising historical and contemporary art. According to Kristina Jansson, the goal has not been to produce finished works in dialogue with the collections:
“Instead, the artworks have been reflected against something that remains unfinished, often uncertain, in the students. Painting Lab has sought to find an unknown nerve, an appeal through time and space that doesn’t need to be formalized, doesn’t undergo an art-theoretical filter, or has to conform to any art-historical canon.”
The work has been structured in a way that allows students to approach the institutions’ pieces at eye level and with a generously exploratory and curious approach.
In the introduction to the publication that the students produced alongside the collaboration and exhibition coordinated at Galleri Mejan in June 2023, Kristina Jansson writes:
To create an artistic work is to be the one who creates and the one who sees and experiences something slightly foreign.
The artwork is its own body, something we should manufacture with our bodies and their entire arsenal of sensory abilities and physical competences, in an attempt to make the artwork independent. The body of the artwork. I have always liked to think of what we depict as, in the best case, “undead” objects.
During the year, we have looked through ancient books at Hagströmer Library and attended various lectures on different ways of understanding and perceiving the body. Most of the time, it has revolved around the human gaze on the human body. As artists, we transcend that attitude as soon as we take a material into our hands. It is not common to experience objects, tools, and other forms of material as bodies in a general sense. Perhaps we can hope that contemporary humans expand their sensitivity towards all living things, but as artists, bodily presence deceptively lurks in the hope surrounding our works. That they will survive, that they will create their own very specific breath.