Kristina Jansson

For Kristina Jansson a painting is never only an image but rather the friction between image and material. A painting refers to something illustrative, but in fact the subversive and sensual properties of the material create a barrier between the obvious and the unknown. Whatever it wants to depict will remain a jumble between image and the way the material transmits its content. 

Jansson’s grand and ambiguous works often deal with the images’ emblematic relationship to human undercurrents and desires, such as money, power and lust. She is also preoccupied with architectural space, perception and memory using the painting as a visually seductive construction. The importance of the narratives displayed in the paintings diminishes though along with the work process. It becomes equalized with the materiality of the painting. This in spite of that the narrative constitutes both the conceptual and thematic engine in the process of creating the painting. 

Kristina Jansson has consistently returned to the question of what she as a painter can create with a medium already so burdened. Maybe this aspect becomes more visible within our age ? Nowadays we are so imprinted by the photographic image that a painting in a way always appears to be incomprehensible and strange from where it observes us.  

Kristina Jansson (b 1967 in Sweden) has studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris France, The Fine Arts Academy, Vienna, Austria; and The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, from where she graduated in 2001. Her work has been widely exhibited both in Sweden and abroad and she is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed painters. Recent solo-exhibitions include Värmlands Konstmuseum (2021), Norrtälje Konsthall (2018) and Borås Konstmusuem (2015) among others.