Carl Johan Högberg

KINGFISHER
In ”Kingfisher” Swedish artist Carl Johan Högberg presents new paintings, textile works and ceramic objects in a site-specific installation that weaves together elements from the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King with myths and tales of the kingfisher bird.

In the old Celtic legend the Fisher King is the last keeper of the Holy Grail. Struck immobile by injuries in his legs and groin the wounded ruler sits fishing by a lake outside his castle. Being one with his kingdom, his empire is bound to suffer with its king, and as his wounds never heal the land is forever plagued with famine and war.

In the world of birds, it is said that the female kingfisher carries her aged male on her wings and takes care of him until he dies. Another old belief is that the body of a kingfisher, if dried and hung on a ship, can ward off thunderbolts and storms. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung mentions the kingfisher in his legendary The Red Book, a diary he kept between 1914 and 1930 during sessions in which Jung conducted experiments on his own psyche. In the book Jung describes a dream he had one night in which an old Celt with horns of a bull and kingfisher’s wings appears from the sky and presents himself as Philemon, a figure who was later to become Jung’s guru and spirit guide. In order to remember the dream Jung immediately starts to paint the scene and when he is finished he is startled to find a dead kingfisher in his garden—chocked since the bird doesn’t naturally exist in the vicinity of Zurich. Later on he uses this event to describe synchronicity, the phenomenon of two or more apparently unrelated events occurring together, not by chance but out of meaningful coincident.

With the stories of the kingfisher and the Fisher King as point of departure, Högberg intertwines the accidental and the deliberate. The initial connection of two words mirroring each other echoes throughout the installation and new points of convergence emerge between the old myths. The works acquire their meaning from the way the individual pieces are shuffled, re-contextualized and put together to demonstrate new connections and relationships, reminding us that there are countless ways to interpret a story, a legend or, for that matter, a painting. By letting pre-existing images deplored of context inflect each other Högberg opens up for new associations, and the original narrative loose ground to a new tale of man’s timeless quest for intimacy, youth and health.

10 April - 25 June 2011,
BIS71 Ruimte Voor Kunst, Geleen

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HEALTH THROUGH SPORTS #2
‘Health Through Sports’ is Carl Johan Högberg’s (1979, Eskilstuna Sweden) first solo exhibition at the gallery. With new enigmatic paintings, objects and textile works, he will do his utmost to demonstrate his relationship to a work by Max Ernst. It’s a show about jamais vu, anthropomorphism and obtaining health through sports.

In the photomontage La Santé par le sport (1920) by French Dadaist Max Ernst a classical male nude is standing, dramatically lit, on a pedestal. He holds a golf club in his left hand and an alligator’s brain in his right, his face obscured by a folk art-looking crochet butterfly. Drawn to different strategies of appropriation and interested in circumstantial reading of images, La Santé par le sport has become a mnemonic device, a voodoo doll that has haunted Högberg’s art for the last year.
In Högberg’s painting ‘Health Through Sports’ (2010) a figure is wearing a home-made paper mask. Crowned by a Native American war bonnet and the eyes of Horus, the figure looms over the gallery and bears a curious resemblance to a surreal cult leader or a chieftain in a 1970s theatre production. On a pedestal made of mirrors lays a life-size ping pong bat cast in bronze. Initially it looks light to play with, but we are soon reminded that the bronze makes it too heavy for the hand. In another painting, a bearded man with a badminton racket in one hand and a shuttlecock in the other is slowly drowning in the light of a blazing sun.

With the surreal tension intact, the seemingly haphazard elements of Ernst’s picture are magnified in a parallel world of associations and oppositions. Pre-existing images depleted of context inflect one another to form new relationships and connections with Ernst’s photomontage as a constant reference. Nostalgia and estrangement from a time that has passed, blend with a fear of aging and an ambiguous tribute to youth and health, in works forming a non-linear vision without narrative foreclosure.

2 April - 7 May 2011,
Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam

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HEALTH THROUGH SPORTS #1
Carl Johan Högberg combines paintings, prints, posters and objects to create installations in which a construction of meaning develops through syntactic structure. Högberg employs the characteristic qualities of a medium to demonstrate formal relationships and intrinsic connections. The installation is a cross between a collage, in which fragmentary and associative meanings may be discovered, and a narrative whole, in which logical relationships exist between individual elements, However, the juxtaposition of different styles, materials, dimensions and contexts results in the moment of “objective” interpretation constantly being delayed.

The installation Health Through Sports (2010) consists of a vase, two paintings, a print, a folding screen and a bronze object. The title is an allusion the Max Ernst’s collage La Santé par le Sport (1920). In this work, Ernst combined a classical figure with surprising elements such as a butterfly mask and a golf club. Högberg’s painting of a young girl in a bird mask is derived from this collage and also alludes to Max Ernst’s nickname, the Bird Man. The print is an optical illusion; elongated geometric shapes turn out to be words. The bronze ping pong bat lying on the floor shows an imprint of a ping pong ball. The image is surreal in appearance and could also represent a moon in the sky at night. The vase, like the folding screen, serves to reinforce the exotic atmosphere that features in many of Högberg’s installations.

The images that Högberg employs come from a variety of contexts, like documents that functions as pieces of evidence. For example, in the installation She Who Speaks (2010) at Bonniers Konsthall and Smart project space (2009) he brought together a number if paintings and objects that related to the history of the medium Hélène Smith. Högberg intelligently combines allusions to her personal story with sculptural elements. Through a continuous process of interpretation and reinterpretation of the relationship between images, he creates a tension between subjective experience and a more objective consensus.
—Suzanne Wallinga, curator Offspring 2010

18 May - 30 May 2010,
De Ateliers, Amsterdam

Images from the top:

Untitled, 52 poems, 2012
Untitled, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2011
Donkey Show, oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm, 2011
Donkey Shot, digital print on silk, 50 x 33 cm, 2011
Untitled, digital print on silk, 2011 (© Robert Harbin by permission of the British Origami Society)
Installation view, KINGFISHER, BIS71 Ruimte Voor Kunst, Geleen 2011
Untitled, oil on canvas, 180 x 210 cm, 2011
Untitled, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm, 2011
Untitled, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm, 2011
Untitled, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm, 2011
Untitled
Health Through Sports, oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm, 2011
Untitled, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, 2011
Installation view, HEALTH THROUGH SPORTS, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam 2011
First Female Mask 1, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, 2011
Installation view, HEALTH THROUGH SPORTS, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam 2011
Installation view, SHE WHO SPEAKS, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam 2009
Installation view, HEALTH THROUGH SPORTS, De Ateliers, Amsterdam 2010
Installation view, HEALTH THROUGH SPORTS, De Ateliers, Amsterdam 2010
Installation view, RUNAWAY TRAIN, Bonniers konsthall 2010

© Carl Johan Högberg 2012

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