Stene Projects proudly presents Safe Haven with Johan Furåker. This is the artist ́s first solo show at the gallery. Furåker is a conceptual painter who is interested in a wide range of mysterious, eccentric and captivating cultural issues, which he uses as a sort of catalouge of ideas for his meticulously performed paintings.
Furåker uses mainly what you might call a ”mimetic” style, i.e. an approach that strives to depict and
reconstruct the physical world in two dimensions in an imitative way, making use of central perspective and other optical effects in order to make the world and its appearrance true and real on the canvas. But, in fact, Johan Furåker does not walk out into the world to paint what he observes ”out there” in the field.
He is not a plein air painter, who is looking to find beautiful, exciting or pictoresque sites in nature or, for that matter, in the city. On the contrary: he paints all of his paintings in his studio, since he finds his motives in the mass media: in articles, in books or in pictures/photographic material. In this respect, his paintings are mediated through the vast knowledge and image-bank of humanity. Johan Furåker is thusly a modern visual artist, representing the 21st century, and working with carefully selected cultural themes that fascinate and challenge him in his artistic work.
