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For That Minimalist Interior: a Surfeit of Materialism

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Sweden’s Michael Johansson takes all that (always originally much needed! useful! desirable!) stuff that has taken over our lives.

Then he forcefully gets it under control, compacting it tightly into packed cubes of stuff, like his Rubik’s Kitchen, shown above. His work was shown at Copenhagen’s ‘Meaning of Void’ at Galleri Christoffer Egelund last month.

In A Stroll Through Space and Time, and his other pieces, he meticulously stacks and interlaces the disparate items to create highly composed, compact volumes and narrative assemblages.

Of course you are not meant to unpack it: how would you ever get it back into this artful form. This is permanent sculpture – to contrast in the most scrupulously minimalist architecture.

His Monochrome Anachron; above, suggests old fashioned travel. Back to a kinder gentler time when the planet was not unburdened by all our stuff?

Perhaps this is the appropriate sculpture for those who have purified their clutter to near nothing and this this is the release for people who have had all the junk and clutter squeezed out of their lives by good design.

In all these pieces, the forceful need to get control of it all is clearly articulated. These pieces of sculpture are like a cry for help from an age obsessed by far too much stuff.

But we still want art. The irony is, art is ultimately just more stuff, too. By re purposing the first into the second, at least he is not wasting more resources.

Source: Daily Tonic