Johanna Karlsson at ABC, Art Berlin

We are pleased to present Johanna Karlsson’s (b. 1968) exhibition Chapters at ABC – Art Berlin Contemporary 2014. Chapters presents new sculptures and drawings in a spatial installation.

The meticulously detailed sections of nature that Johanna Karlsson dissects and constructs, are those that are on the boundary between city and untouched countryside. This is a nature influenced by man, existing in the shadow of civilization. The nature is transformed – rocks are broken, soil is dug up and trees are felled – and it carries stories that are silenced. An excavated hole is a temporary order of natural matter that both talks about bygone eras and something that is yet to come. In Johanna Karlsson’s sculptures, an occasional, seemingly insignificant situation becomes something permanent and significant. A piece of time in an eternal loop.

Johanna Karlsson takes fragments of nature into a cultural context, and the result is a laboratory-like presentation with an emotional load – a personal and poetic natural science. She is studying carefully but not searching, her excavations are not an archaeologist. It is an exploration without endpoint with a convincing methodology to tell about culture by depicting nature. It’s about what we choose to cherish and what we neglect in our natural environment. About our constant need to organize, structure, change, besiege or abandon.

Johanna Karlsson does not ad any special symbolic or thematic narratives to her nature studies. They belong to the larger story of all thing’s birth, construction and destruction. The time spent with the work is synonymous with the content.

Find us in stand B58