Peter Johansson: [WG.97] Barnatro

Peter Johansson characterizes his artistic career as a thirty-year voyage of discovery investigating Swedish culture. In sculptures and installations, he has ruthlessly dissected such Swedish phenomena as wooden painted horses from Dalecarlia, Falukorv, folk dancing and red timber cottages. Peter Johansson grew up during the 1960s and 1970s and, throughout his career, he has worked with the experiences that his upbringing has given him. Often treating these experiences from a tragicomic angle which seeks to distinguish the border between serious art and kitsch.

In the exhibition Barnatro Peter Johansson deals with his childhood experiences growing up in the little village Berga, south of Sälen in Sweden’s Dalecarlia.

” Among the people living there were my paternal grandfather who hated children. There was my father who alternated between copious amounts of work and frustrated anger which ended in outbursts of extreme violence. There was my increasingly unbalanced mother who, when my father died, could get so angry, sad or disappointed with her life that she often took this out on actual objects – like the car or snow scooter – or on someone who was weaker and smaller than herself - like the dog or, me. Also present was the man who sexually abused me for many years. This was one of my father’s colleagues and a family friend.”

Presented in the exhibition are five rooms, turned inside out, visually but foremost emotionally representing the artist’s family home. Theses rooms are accompanied by works based on photos from Peter Johansson’s family album. With his uncompromising approach Peter Johansson takes on the subject of sexual abuse and culture of silence in a highly personal way.