We have the great pleasure to inaugurate the season with Johanna Fjaestad’s solo exhibition “The Night’s lowest Temperature”. It contains a number of paintings and a group of sculptures that emerge in a shimmering light. As the title suggests, the exhibition is permeated by a dreamy and yet alert state of mind, as when seeing the light that breaks the darkness an early morning.

 

The paintings of Johanna Fjaestad exude ease although they are mainly based on oil, applied with great sensitivity. The motives emerge through layers of light brush strokes, recalling a feeling of a momentary state between dream and reality. To us Nordic people, the motives partially derive from a seemingly exotic context, such as vegetation and animals in a jungle-like nature. They describe a longing to get far away and to be part of a different context, both physically and mentally. Yet, there is nothing flattering about  Johanna Fjaestad’s imagery. The depiction is rather about an internal, existential journey than adventurous discoveries in a foreign environment.

Threat and destruction are also recurrent themes in Fjaestad’s works. A portrait of the singer Lana del Rey speaks of seduction and decadence, just as there is a premonition of a disaster in the painting “The Night’s Lowest Temperature” . In a third work we can recall a plane just crashing into the ocean. The threat, the impermanence and feelings of loneliness are constantly present in the paintings’ almost vibrant colors that remain within a restrained yet nuanced scale.

 

The exhibition also includes a group of smaller cowboy sculptures in different positions. Just as the paintings, they are at once gentle and expressive in their clean clear formations. As objects in themselves but also in balance with the paintings they highlight Johanna Fjaestads multifaceted and poetic world of imagery.

 

Johanna Fjaestad is born in 1979 in Stockholm. She lives and works in Stockholm and Norrtälje and is educated at Gerlesborgsskolan (2003-2004) Idun Loven (2005-2006) and the Malmö Art Academy (2006-20012). Solo exhibitions in selection: Galleri Flach, Stockholm (2013), Gallery Arnstedt, Eastern Karup (2013), Gallery of St. Gertrude (2013) Selected group exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art, Malmö (2016), New National Gallery (2015) Gallery Flach, Stockholm (2015) Galleri Thomas Wallner, Simris (2015), Lidköping Art Gallery (2014 ), Gallery Arnstedt, Östra Karup (2014), Galleri Thomas Wallner, Simris (2014), the Wolf Åkra farm (2014), Market (2014), Galleri Thomas Wallner (2013), New Art Gallery (2012) Gallery Zentrale, Vienna (2011) , Rättviks Art Gallery (2009), and Rack City Museum, Arvika (2008).

 

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