Color and Repetition

Playing Tetris with Swedish artist Michael Johansson.

Swedish artists Michael Johansson creates real-life Tetris sculpture pieces by contextualizing mundane objects from our day-to-day life. The random shapes and sizes of these objects create perfectly balanced geometrical forms with a monochrome color scheme that provides a well-defined form and visual identity. 

We spoke with Michael about his journey as an artist, the creative process behind these pieces and what lies ahead for the future.

Image: courtesy of artist.

Pilar: You started your career in Malmö and eventually moved to Berlin. What’s been the main difference between creating as an artist in these two places? 

MJ: I lived in Berlin in 2002 during an exchange year while I was studying, so my plan was always to go back to Berlin after finishing my education. I ended up staying for 10 years in Malmö and I’m really glad that I did. For me, Malmö is the best place where you can produce art because you find everything you need and it doesn’t consume you in the way Berlin does. Also, being here allowed me to build a network with producers that eventually helped with my career. From my point of view, many young artists want to go to Berlin but they get consumed by it because they can’t figure out what to do with themselves. When I ended up moving to Berlin, I did it for myself, not necessarily for work. Berlin has always been my guilty pleasure, and I find it a really interesting city to live in.

Pilar: What was it exactly that drew you to Berlin? 

MJ: In Berlin, the energy doesn’t drain me as it does in other big cities. It feels like many cities within a city, and I love the art culture around it, and the respect there is for it. Ironically, I also like the privacy that comes from living in a big city. 

Pilar: I read that when you create your Tetris-like sculptures you look for objects that tell a story on their own, how do you use each individual object to tell a whole story in your pieces? 

MJ:  I mostly collect items from flea markets and second-hand shops so they already come with a story, and I have no idea what that story is, but I think about what the object has experienced. So, if I build a sculpture with 100 pieces, that’s 100 different stories, because they all come from different times and places. In that sense, I feel like I’m creating an individual that has never existed. But what’s interesting is that everyone that sees the sculpture has their own experience with these items, so it's a narrative I can’t control as much. 

Images via: @michaeljohansson

Pilar: How would you describe the viewer experience in your pieces? 

MJ: I can be very detail-oriented sometimes but when I finish the work it's not up to me anymore. Each piece has its own narrative for whoever experiences it. I present things that everyone has seen before, things most people have probably established a relationship with of some kind. So I just show them in a way that allows them to see that you can look at things from a different perspective. 

Pilar: Color is such a powerful element in your sculptures, how do you choose your palettes? Is it a starting point or something that evolves as you are constructing your pieces? 

MJ: It can be either a dialogue in my head of what I want to build or just looking at the items that I have in my collection When I started I didn’t use color in the way I do now. It has been an evolution of my work. In a way, by incorporating color I was allowing myself to add layers of complexity to what I was doing, and that kept me going. Now I’m working with reflections too, something I hadn’t done before. 

When I do the Model Kit Series, I attach the items to a metal frame and I have to paint them to match the colors, and I don’t like doing it because it changes the dynamic of the objects a lot. That’s part of the reason why I love working with items of color.  

I find harmony in shape, structure, and color. So, sometimes it comes naturally, sometimes I have to think about it. 

Images via: @michaeljohansson

Pilar: Can you tell me about the symmetry and repetition that we always see in your installations? 

MJ: For my Master's thesis I wrote a paper on repetition, so I’ve always been drawn to it. I find repetition to be quite difficult to work with because the mirror effects are too obvious and can kill the work, so I was trying ways to work with repetition in a different way, and paying attention to the small details. I also started finding double pieces on flea markets of things that I already had that I thought are pretty special, and that created a sensation in my head of how I could incorporate them into the sculptures. I find it interesting and special to find the differences between two identical items that reflect their previous life, like scratches or marks. Everything is exactly the same, but you can see the items have been used differently. 

Images via: @michaeljohansson

Pilar: How would you say your work has evolved since you started and where you find yourself right now? 

MJ: COVID changed a lot for me, the past two years are like they don’t exist. Right now Im working on permanent public work that was supposed to be made in 2020 and finishing all the projects that I wasn’t able to do during lockdowns, I will hopefully be done by February. I want to go traveling again, and do all the things that were on pause for a while. In a way I also found the pause refreshing, to realize what is important and what is now but I’m excited to get the ball rolling and see what happens.