Lena Johansson - Transference : Stockholm

Andréhn-Schiptjenko is pleased to present Lena Johansson’s second solo show at the gallery. 

Lena Johansson has been widely acclaimed for her small, intense oil paintings with motifs taken from lifestyle media. They have often been combined with paintings of interiors and houses and together the groups of paintings have formed narratives based on the relationship between the characters and the settings.

In this Lena Johansson’s second exhibition at the gallery, the intimate format remains but the paintings show a larger variety of expression. Some portraits are full of details and are painted empathetically; whereas some interiors are populated by more stylized models. The attractive motifs still come from a commercial visual world, but have ambiguous quality, making them evasive and mysterious to the viewer.

Alongside the paintings, a doll’s house constructed by Lena Johansson, is exhibited. Both the paintings and the model become shadow boxes showing a fantasy and dream world. With the logic of the sub conscious, the motifs and the models are connected in a chain of thoughts about the picturesque in relation to the three-dimensional, about longing to get away, about reality and human relations.

Lena Johansson recently participated in the group show Fluid Flesh at Nordic Contemporary Art Space in Paris.