Jan Håfström Walker


28 April 2001 23 September 2001

Solo exhibition
Main hall, Färgfabriken


Färgfabriken is very proud to announce its next major exhibition. From April 28th, Jan Håfström’s Walker will be at Färgfabriken’s main hall. This is his first proper exhibition since the retrospectives at Rooseum and Moderna museet in 1994 and 1995.


It is a very radical return to exhibiting, in which Jan Håfström will present 30 new works; a return to and a radicalisation of the figurative, pop-inspired painting he was doing in the mid-60s. And it is a form of painting far removed from the intimate, non-figurative approach which characterised his work during the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

In working on this exhibition, Jan Håfström has been strongly influenced by his trips to Russia, first to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow, during which Färgfabriken produced his exhibition entitled “The Inner Station”. Originally it was this exhibition, somewhat extended, which was to be shown at Färgfabriken, but fate decided otherwise. In a remarkable show of creative energy, the artist has produced a suite of works which marks an entirely new phase in his career. In this case “new” still means “different”, though. As Ulf Linde has pointed out, Jan Håfström’s “coat is cut from a different cloth”: WALKER is just another way of entering Håfström’s unique universe. The starting point is a brutal murder in a St. Petersburg street, from which Jan Håfström extracts manifold plays on references stretching from Jospeh Conrad to the Phantom, from film sequences to icons. At the centre of it all is Walker.

A full-colour book will be produced of the exhibition, comprising over 150 pages and cataloguing Jan Håftsröm’s new works as well as including snapshots of the trips to Russia (by Matthias Johansson) and new texts by Aris Fioretos, Carl Michael von Hauswolff and Jan Åman. The book will be designed by Anders Ljungman