Albert Johansson

Swedish designer, 1926-1998

Albert Johansson glued shop bought Father Christmas masks to canvas and painted them out in black and white. The reliefs were meant, and read, as the erasure of the individual in a technocratic society: an argument made in material rather than in image, a face produced by the thousand and then flattened into monochrome. Other works mix concrete filler with distemper, which gives a surface closer to a wall than to a painting. Johansson came from Stensele in Lapland and trained first under Isaac Grünewald, then at the Moderna konstskolan in Stockholm, where Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen was among his teachers. He showed non figurative work at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris in 1953 and exhibited with Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd two years after that. The Nationalmuseum holds his work.