HANS ANDERSSON

8 MAY – 8 JUNE 2025

SVENSKA

To sit with Hans Andersson’s new pictures as I have done is to expose oneself to something deeply seductive. They invite lingering, to let them become objects of meditation. And they are likely the fruit of a long meditation themselves, perhaps one lasting an entire lifetime.
For me, the new works evoke memories of lyrical places, physical places and songs that I realised were buried in myself and came back to me like a warm and fragrant, flower-saturated storm when I opened myself to them.
I think of the opening poem in Birgitta Trotzig's collection Anima from 1982:

            I look into the green, surface in infinity, whispering infinity, body of whispers, tongues, the green is tongues and eyes, reflections and movement, moisture, sparks of light – in what way am I separate from it, I am not separate from it, I exist in an eye, all is reflections and whispers, light in a dark mirror walks further and further into the mirrored forest

The bliss of the self forgetting the illusion of its isolation and becoming one with everything else. The cascades of luminous pastels covering the white sheets give an impression of something rich and exclusive. The colours seem to belong to a melancholic high-summer palette. Summer, that Nordic state of exception. Those cool evenings that smell of lilacs. That time of year which seems to bring out the latent animist streak in most people who venture out alone in the green. The self is fertilized and doubles itself. It is the ecstatic season when an ephemeral sister appears among the rosebushes and invites you down to the vast halls of the underworld, like in Astrid Lindgren’s My Very Own Sister (Allra käraste syster). It is the time when it is possible to make and drink the lilac wine that has the power to conjure a vanished lover, as Nina Simone and Jeff Buckley sing about in the song Lilac Wine, where the euphoric self, almost completely consumed by longing, whispers out its heart and pours it into the drink in order to see the beloved return, blurred as in a haze of intoxication. It is also the time when the river man reveals himself at night, the one to whom Nick Drake wants to entrust his plans, to tell him what he intends to do during what he calls lilac time, in the song River man.
The colours in Hans Andersson’s new images are those that nature produces at the quiet height of summer, before the grass turns dry, the flowers fall from the trees, and the sister vanishes.
If the images in Hans Andersson’s previous series consisted of cut-up, separated fragments of a whole, then in the new ones a more unifying, coalescing force is at work.
There is something deeply inviting about them: joyful, unfettered, and radiant with the charisma of experience.

Text: Eli Levén

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HANS ANDERSSON, born 1979 in Kalmar, Sweden, currently lives and works in Stockholm. Hans Andersson holds a MFA at Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, 2005.

Hans Andersson’s work has been shown at LOKO Gallery, Tokyo; Revolver Gallery, Lima; Galeria F2, Madrid; Fenberger House, Nagano; The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm; Federico García Lorca Centre, Granada; Liljevalchs, Stockholm; Fullersta Gård, Stockholm; Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm and Helsinki; Angelika Knäpper Gallery, Stockholm, among others.

Hans Andersson has received several art grants such as Gerard Bonnier Exhibition Grant, the Helge Ax:son Johnson Grant, and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s Working Grant and Travel Grant.

Hans Andersson’s work is in the permanent collection of Malmö Konstmuseum; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping; The Public Art Agency Sweden; The Swedish Embassy, Beijing; Fenberger House, Nagano; among others. Public art commissions include Södertälje Hospital and Region Kalmar, Sweden.

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