From personal memory to global crisis: Jan Håfström returns to Moderna Museet

STOCKHOLM.- Jan Håfström is one of the most noted artists in Swedish contemporary art. He has been active for sixty years with exhibitions both in Sweden and internationally. At Moderna Museet, visitors will encounter art that he has been working on recently, and that comes directly from his studio.

Jan Håfström (born 1937) works with painting, sculpture, prints, installation, drawing and film. He debuted in the 1960s and his artistic work moves between the personal and the universal.

The Studio, a Sanctuary

Ever since childhood, when he used to draw in a quiet corner of the home, the studio has been a sanctuary for Jan Håfström. There, as he himself has put it, “a constant murmuring conversation between different ages in life” takes place.

On the walls and floors of the studio, paintings, sculptures and painted objects meet, forming temporary clusters or larger wholes. Here, works can be revised over time and gradually change form. Expressions, references and themes recur and connect new works with previous ones.

The exhibition at Moderna Museet takes its starting point from the artist’s daily work in the studio, offering the audience a kind of snapshot of an ongoing process of change in which the works bear no individual titles.

Different Times, Side by Side

The title refers to Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World from 1912, the story of an expedition to a place where time seems to have stopped, or rather where different times exist side by side.

Exhibition curator Matilda Olof-Ors says: “In Jan Håfström’s art, the past is rarely something distant or finished. On the contrary, the past appears as a tangible presence, sometimes as strong as or stronger than the present. Time becomes an orbiting movement where motifs and moods return in new forms.”

Impressions, Memories and Moods

Jan Håfström has often described his work as an archaeological excavation of his own life. Impressions, memories and moods from childhood are reworked and given a new shape. Sometimes they are placed in relation to larger historical or contemporary events, other times they remain anchored in personal experiences.

Today’s humanitarian disasters, such as the refugee flows across the Mediterranean and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, are connected in Håfström’s visual world to childhood experiences of Second World War.

The works’ references range from popular culture to the worlds of philosophy, literature and art.

Many of them reveal elements of loneliness and loss. Some objects have been carefully wrapped or covered, as if to protect and preserve them – or perhaps to hold together what would otherwise risk falling apart and being lost.

The exhibition is curated by Matilda Olof-Ors.

“Jan Håfström: The Lost World” is shown in the museum’s smaller exhibition room, 144 square metres, right next to the restaurant.