Torbjörn Johansson The Color of My Eye

Solo exhibition
Project rooms, Färgfabriken

Site specific works for Färgfabriken’s Project rooms by Torbjörn Johansson.

In one space we find the physical color in its full materiality. Here the artist has used color in different forms to explode the boundaries of painting. The beautiful oil paint squeezes out from the gaps in the room’s wooden floor planks in thick pools of color. Because you remove your shoes at the entrance, the experience becomes tactile as well as visual.

The second space is the opposite of the physical: the digital. Here we find photographs, moving pictures, and projections. Johansson says, “I want to involve the process, the act, in the execution and in this case I’m using the loop as a method.”

The pieces in both spaces are interlinked. Using the original form of brush, the hand itself, the artist paints a green line that wanders along the edge of the space. The piece Greenwalk loops through and around in the space/building, both physically and digitally.

About the artist

Johansson was born in 1959 and now works in Stockholm, where he graduated from the Royal University College of Fine Arts in 1992. He works with exploring a space through painting, lighting, and video. In recent years he has had solo shows in Stockholm, Trondheim, Paris, and Bangkok and participated in group shows in Tokyo, New York, Rome, and Berlin. With more than a dozen public commissions already, another will be unveiled this spring in the new Blåsut plaza in Stockholm. He is one of the instigators for the WIP:STHLM complex of artists’ studios in Årstaberg, a collaboration among about a hundred artists. Johansson has worked as a project manager 2007-11 at Stockholms Konst, which administers over the city’s public art.