HANS ANDERSSON
14 JANUARI – 14 FEBRUARI 2021
Hans Andersson’s process and studio work are undefined but characterised by discipline; periods of meditation and pondering alternate with indefinite and rigorous action; a balancing act between chance and necessity; between error and aesthetic considerations; long hours, seven days a week. His works turn into a kind of distillation of his interests: phenomenology and fragrances are brought together with sound art and Indian garden painting. It is, in one sense, an intuitive work process where transcendence and rational understanding are intertwined at the frontier between reason and mysticism, hinting at automatic writing. With Hans Andersson, art is its own experience. The process and the works are linked with and become a part of the metamorphic state in which the world is continually involved. The visible world is what it is. The constant and the capricious in seemingly perpetual flux.
The meagre materials contrast with the richness suggested in their multiplicity. An almost exalted merging of materials including textile scraps, coloured and dyed paper, sheets of painted paper and bits of labels and fragments torn out of Italian Vogue, perhaps a few seemingly forgotten chalk stumps. Add shellac, coffee grounds, watercolour and pencil – not to mention dusts and other surface dirt. The surface texture of the works is accentuated by the plethora of materials they are created with. At times, the many layers turn into double exposures, where chance has brought forth new orientations as the shadows and contours of the original image persist.
The at times monumental format of the works, where in one case the features of the support create folds in the image’s surface, achieves a movement away from the flatness of the surface, lending it a sculptural quality. The status of the work as an object is asserted. The allusion to minimalism through its vicinity to objecthood or the sculptural spatiality of the work is further suggested in the second of the larger work exhibited. There one glimpses the wall on which it is mounted, where cut-like gaps have arisen between slightly ragged collage items, painted in Prussian blue, violet, or English red. A stub of hemp string has broken loose from its bed as if the underlying construction and motive of the work were revealed in one and the same instant.
In the smaller works these impressions are also significant, if not equally prominent. Brittle threads make their way out of the surface of the image. A piece torn from a sheet of paper or a ragged cloth indicates a direction beyond painting’s conventional rectangular frame. The smaller works invite close study, as if they were sections of a larger whole, a whole of which the two monumental works are a part but through their dimensions embrace the beholder and let them sink into the winding web of paper fragments.
HANS ANDERSSON (b. 1979) lives and works in Stockholm. He was educated at Konstfack - University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm.
Hans Andersson has exhibited in several solo shows and participated in numerous group shows, in Sweden and internationally. He has shown at, for instance, Angelika Knäpper Gallery, Stockholm; Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm; Gallery LOKO, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan; Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm; Revolver Gallery, Lima, Peru; Galerie F2, Madrid, Spain, and at Fenberger House, Nagano, Japan.
Hans Andersson is represented in the collections of Malmö Konstmuseum; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping; The Swedish Embassy, Beijing, China, and at the Public Art Agency Sweden. In 2019 he received an exhibition grant from The Royal Art Academy. Major public art commissions include Södertälje Hospital in Sweden.
Hans Andersson is also of current interest with his participation in the exhibition "Repetition" at Gallery LOKO, Shibuya, Tokyo, through 22 January, and "Jardines y mascotas" at Galeria F2, Spain, through 20 February.