When Jens Fänge debuted in the mid-1990s, it was with a painting practice rooted in a surrealist visual world, often with references to popular culture and Pop Art. In recent years, he has moved from purely painterly work toward assemblage—a three-dimensional collage technique in which he intervenes in the space using textiles, paint, wood, and objects. Patterned wall coverings, reminiscent of mural paintings, create backdrops onto which paintings and sometimes found objects are placed. The result is a fluid visual world in which the works enter into and emerge from one another.

When I painted on canvas, I often used small drawings that I taped onto the surface to test different compositions. I tried sawing out figures in hardboard and attaching them to the painting. Then it was as if the work could only continue beyond the edges of the painting. Quite seamlessly, the same idea or method could be applied to the entire room, using the wall itself as a canvas. The original flat paintings suddenly became parts of a larger motif.

– Jens Fänge

In the works, we encounter labyrinthine, dreamlike rooms in which paintings-within-paintings—using motifs from other works by the artist—recur. The dreamlike atmosphere is heightened by the repetition and development of figures and objects. In a series of works, we may meet a character in the same position but in different settings, or the same geometric pattern executed in different materials. This creates a subtle shift in the meaning and function of the object. In Fänge’s art, we are left with hints and mysteries. We sense that something has occurred, yet receive no clear indication of what.

In Drömmarna (“The Dreams”), Fänge alternates between large and small gestures, challenging the viewer’s sense of scale and perspective. The new monumental work Theme for Shared Rooms (2018), a fifteen-metre-long patterned wall piece, is visible through the kunsthalle’s glass façade facing Torsgatan. Passersby are thus offered the opportunity to view Fänge’s visual world, with the visitors inside the gallery becoming an additional dimension of the work.

For the exhibition, the book Drömmarna was produced—a comprehensive publication on Jens Fänge created in collaboration with the publisher Art & Theory. The book includes, among other things, an essay by the English art critic Martin Herbert.

Jens Fänge was born in Gothenburg in 1965. He lives and works in Stockholm. Fänge studied at Akademin Valand in Gothenburg (1989–1994), and has exhibited in galleries and institutions in Sweden and internationally since the mid-1990s.

Image: Jens Fänge, Within, 2015, assemblage, detail. Photo: Galleri Magnus Karlsson.

In Bonniers Konsthall’s digital shop you can find a notebook as well as the posters; Within and Våren.