Marcus Hansson at ID:I

It is strange. Marcus Hansson's exhibition looks as though it could be a boutique in Södermalm: on the left, two racks of shirts and sweaters, a hoodie or so, a few caps. Further inside, in the next room, there is another rack of clothes, a poster on the wall, a revolving postcard rack, and visual artworks on the wall behind it. And when you return to the first room, there are also three photo collages on the walls without clothes. I can't quite get a grasp on what I'm looking at.

The clothes are designed and ordered by the artist; the neck label bears the title – Love Song, for example. The motifs or patterns are taken from earlier artworks by Hansson. You can go and look them up in the books and binders he has brought to the exhibition Framtida restlager dåtida pestlager at ID:I. The works may be considerably older than the garments, which themselves date from quite different periods, as though this were not an art project at all, but simply an inclination to have a shirt made from one of his works now and then.

People come in, and from their questions it remains unclear whether they know they are looking at art or whether they are interested in the garments as garments. And what difference would that really make to the answers? In any case, nothing is for sale, not even the large works on the walls. These, too, are from different periods, and it is unclear whether there is any concept or common thread here. I suppose it would have to be something to do with stock, with layers, then. It is peculiar that I can't get a grasp on the whole thing. ID:I's space is not large, but it feels as though I am wandering through a hall of mirrors, as though my gaze were simply bouncing around.

One constant that quietly unsettles your usual way of understanding the world is that Hansson's works here take on mass-produced forms, which he has had produced exclusively as unique originals. The clothes are made to measure for his body. Even the postcards in the rack (snapshots from a beach over the course of several summers) are originals, so each image exists only as a single postcard. They do not exist in any other print. This captures something of the feeling in many of his motifs: people simply look stereotypical and mass-produced, yet they appear out of the ordinary all the same.

Like the red-haired man in Paris in 1992, who, with his mustache and sunglasses, is living it up at a table: so typical, so strange, and probably entirely unaware of either. Here he appears on coasters. Situations look banal, and at the same time there is perhaps something incomprehensible about them: a guy walking out into the water looks as though he has just left the jet ski on the beach. Perhaps it is extraordinarily dramatic; perhaps it isn't even his jet ski. An unusual postcard motif. Somehow, the whole space now seems like that. It makes you uncertain, an uncertainty only partly offset by thinking of it as an installation.

If anything, the confusion gets worse when you begin to concentrate on the works on the walls. The painting next to the postcard rack, Celebration parades #326, not only refers to the series of garments titled Celebration parades, but is itself a scanned photograph of a painting, printed onto fabric. That painting, in turn, was made only because Marcus Hansson wanted to make a book about himself as a painter, which he is not. So he had to produce, by every possible means, things that could pass for painterly works when they were "documented" for the book, which has the same title as everything else in this paragraph. It was printed in 2023.

It is as though you never quite find solid ground under your feet here, even though so much is concrete, direct, and tangible. Take the new work Sto più avvelenato di loro. It is a framed color photograph of a framed black-and-white photograph of the entrance to an Italian household. The black-and-white image feels like a picture from the early 1970s, pasted onto a large advertising display, possibly on a fake exterior wall inside a shopping mall. There, on the floor in front of the picture within the picture, leaning against the wall, Marcus Hansson has pasted in a photograph of a bouquet of flowers. But not just like that.

He has wrapped a small piece of fabric around the stems of the photographed bouquet and fastened it with pins inserted into a backing. He then photographed this arrangement, cut out the image precisely along the individual stems and leaves, and glued it onto the picture in the exhibition. This strange gesture makes you want to touch it with your finger, just to make sure that it is actually there, for real. And yet it has a strong tendency to turn into an image before your eyes, even though you almost want to think of it as a two-dimensional sculpture.

Once again, the individual thing is always far stranger than it looks, and every act is, in fact, rather mysterious. Near the exit stand his worn pool slides, with "beachen" in the same graphic design as on some of the postcards from the beach. More than anything, I would like to slip them on and wander on through his enchanted world of unassuming things.

Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen
for konsten.net