verk + art
Amanuelabiy
In our showroom
28 September – 25 November 2022
With his characteristic paintings, Amanuelabiy takes us to a world both unknown and familiar. On his large-scale canvases, wide landscapes unfurl and compose the backdrop for surreal encounters in the foreground. In the exhibition at VERK, we meet three new paintings, The Realization, Fear and Excitement and Jammed Inside #2.
Strict, architectonical structures pile up in front of the viewer. Distinct angles and clear, fiery colours. Is this a building? A scaffolding, a tower, a sculpture? It does not have an obvious function, just standing there, in the center of the painting.
The soft beige and light blue colours of the background contrast and highlight the shapes the painting presents. The landscape does not reveal anything about where the scene is taking place. It could be a desert, a savannah, a runway. No people are visible. Even though the artist does not give away any hint about the size of the objects, the format of the paintings suggests they are big. They occupy space.
In Fear and Excitment, we can see a large complex yellow body with straight lines and sharp angles. Slightly behind stands a counterpart with soft organic shapes and colours. The silhouettes seem to interact and to mirror each other. In The Realization, on the contrary, the bodies grow together. The organic and the industrial world meet and merge into one structure. Jammed inside #2 is another variation in which the organic body is embraced by a bright orange building structure. Is it suffocating the organic form? Or is the latter itself expanding until the building explodes?
Amanuelabiy´s work departs from the tension in the relation between different materials, forms and colours. He contrasts nature with geometric forms, metal and manufactured objects, and the organic world with the industrial. He balances on the line between figurative painting and abstraction, by depicting abstract structures in a figurative way. Thus, he plays with our perception of our material surroundings, both the natural and the man-made ones. He leads our thoughts to our relation to nature, to our build environment and to our own bodies in the world. His paintings, as well as his sculptural work, discuss the relation between different bodies, languages an attitudes – in terms of symbols and people. He captures a tension pointing out both dependency and conflict, interaction and support. Referring to classical landscape painting, architectural portrayals and hinting of Salvador Dalí´s backgrounds, Amanuelabiy interweaves different cultures and possibilities of interpretation.
The relation between stringent forms and the organic body is something that even Verk´s furniture collection has to face: To design furniture is to think about the human body, its constitution and needs. Amanuelabiy´s paintings mirror and refine a thought that is also present in the furniture we sit on when looking at them.

VERK + ART
In addition to our furniture, you can also experience contemporary art at Verk’s showroom in Södermalm, Stockholm. Our collaboration with art curator Simone Schmid has paved the way for dialogue with both new and established artists. She selects art that raises issues and invites dialogue. In opening our doors to art, we are placing ourselves in a new context. We hope to be able to offer art lovers a new way of seeing furniture, and design enthusiasts an entry point to contemporary art.
The showroom exhibition
Runs from 28 September – 25 November 2022
Showroom open Monday to Friday
10:00-12:00 / 13:00-16:00
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Folkungagatan 146
116 30 Stockholm
Simone Schmid
Art curator
Simone Schmid is an established name on the Swedish art scene. She worked as director of Wetterling Gallery for many years before becoming a freelance curator and has extensive knowledge of both Swedish and international contemporary art. She will select art for Verk’s showroom that invites dialogue and raises issues close to the company’s heart. We can look forward to four exhibitions per year with openings, personal viewings, lectures, talks and exciting interactions between design and art in various forms. Welcome to a new way of experiencing and buying art!
Previous Exhibitions
Torbjörn Johansson
1 June – 26 August 2022
Color is the central element in Torbjörn Johansson´s work. His paintings, sculptures, performances and films joyfully investigate the physical characteristics of color and the materiality of paint. How do they affect us and the surrounding space?
In Verk´s showroom in Stockholm, a selection of paintings from Torbjörn Johanssons´s series Stråk (Streak) will be presented during the summer months. The title is a description of the movement that constitutes the motif in all works. We meet two enormous steaks in a large green painting dominating one wall, contrasted by a pattern of 28 small paintings on the opposite wall. The colors are many and they are strong. Luminous sometimes, subdued in other parts. These works are not hiding. Together they create an elaborate ensemble that transforms into an overall experience in relation to the room.
The paintings are an abstract study of color, form, materiality and movement. Often, there is a monochrome background on which the artist executes one or several distinctive brushstrokes. They are imprints of a concentrated movement and provide a characteristic expression for every single work. The process is as planned as it is intuitive and demands full presence.
Torbjörn Johansson´s body of work is characterized by experimentation and playfulness. There is a curiosity and fearlessness that shows for example in the use of unconventional materials like sour milk or a mixture of oil and wax in the paintings we see in the exhibition. The investigation of how color, light and surface interact with the surroundings and the viewer results in endless possibilities that occur when the artist varies these ingrediencies over and over again.
The artist´s body and movement are always present in this work. We experience the paintings as a frozen moment, like a still taken out from a larger context. There is a before and an after, an aspect of time and a flow that reaches beyond the limits of the canvas.
Torbjörn Johansson´s paintings are not descriptions, they are possibilities. With his repetitive way of working in series, he studies the infinite. He illustrates the importance and the consequences of each choice one makes – as artist in the creative process, as human in life.

Rebecka Bebben Andersson
10 March – 6 May 2022
Rebecka Bebben Andersson´s work takes us on a journey through an inner and an outer world, making us feel the pulsating rhythm of life. In her delicate collages, she creates organic forms in soft earthy colors, and moves through a universe of patterns that elicits associations with both embroidery and abstract painting.
Collage has been part of Rebecka Bebben Andersson´s working process since her time at art school. It offers a possibility to slow down the process and consequently structures both the mental and the practical part of the creative work. Her collages can both come as large sculptural installations, or as pictures on the wall, as seen in the exhibition at Verk.
It is an arduous way of working that results in images playing with the abstract and the figurative. Rebecka Bebben Andersson prepares her working material herself, by painting large sheets of paper that she later cuts by hand in thousands of small pieces. These are always rectangular, reminding of brush strokes. The collages can therefore be considered paintings. There is a certain nerdiness in the obsession of finding the perfect color and format for these small pieces, that culminates in the artist´s statement that “there are pieces that are TOO good to use”.
Although Rebecka Bebben Andersson´s collages seem abstract at first glance, it is often the body – or bodies – that are the starting point for her motives. The human body or images from nature are built up layer by layer, not only physically, but also historically and mentally. The pattern of a snow-covered bush in a winter landscape represents likewise a network of veins inside a body, and a mental map showing an emotional state of the mind. This becomes obvious in titles as “Snow in March” and “Day before StG” (StG referring to the hospital St. Görans in Stockholm). The thousands of small pieces forming each collage remind of small cells building a complete body, moving, growing, and changing. This creates a rhythm in the works adding the aspect of time and making them feel alive.

Ulrika Sparre
6 December 2021 – 28 January 2022
VERK+ART´s forth exhibition focusses on works by Swedish interdisciplinary artist Ulrika Sparre. For the first time, we are presenting sculpture and photography in our showroom.
Ulrika Sparre investigates the mechanisms, behaviors and social patterns that constitute our lives. Her practice explores subjects like individuality and the impact of the development towards individualism and consumerism in contemporary society. She is interested in how non-religious and scientific beliefs are expressed in the secularized western society of today. The perception of nature, a higher truth, and spiritual experiences are central themes in her work. Her work is often based on notions of the immaterial, the spiritual, and the mythological.
The exhibition includes works from her series Ear to the Ground, reflecting a search for the spiritual and the physical in nature, and how these relationships are created and transformed. In this series, the artist moves through the archipelago of Stockholm, across the desert of Death Valley, and into the caves of nomads in South Africa, while crossing the path of Giacometti, as she investigates the land of rocks. She has performed several field recordings of stones in which she reflects on what we perceive and take with us from an experience in nature.

Jonas Bouleau
1 September – 26 November 2021
In our third exhibition at VERK´s showroom, we are introducing painter Jonas Bouleau who is going into depth with how we see and experience the world around us. Deeply rooted in the tradition of painting and its ability to relate to images, he literally opens our eyes to understand how perception and manipulation are inseparably connected.
Jonas Bouleau´s paintings make our eyes the starting point to examine the human vision, both as an image and conceptually. Our eyes as a part of the human body – and thus easy for us to relate to – are the sense that picks up and transmits information that we receive from our environment. To investigate how we see and what we see, what would be more adequate than the eye itself as a motif?
In his latest works, an additional theme returns frequently, however tightly connected with our vision, namely light. In the shape of candles, flames or the sun, Jonas Bouleau approaches light as the source of our possibility to experience the world, and to exist in it in the first place.

EKTA
12 MAY – 13 AUGUST 2021
In spring and summer, drawings by Gothenburg-based artist EKTA will fill the walls of VERK´s showroom. The works presented are characterized by playful abstraction, an interest in immediate expression and the love for imperfection. Inspired by everyday life and a unique ability to fuse the drawing´s straightforwardness with hints to the aesthetics of art history, EKTA understands his work as a never-ending process.
EKTA (Daniel Götesson, *1978) has early earned international fame with his large murals in public spaces. However, studio work and smaller formats have gained more and more importance in his work in recent years. Since 2005, he has regularly exhibited in galleries, art institutions and museums in Sweden and abroad. He has also been working with larger private and public commissions.

Johannes Hägglund
4 February – 30 April 2021
The first exhibition at VERK´s showroom presents large, energetic paintings by Johannes Hägglund that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. The beautiful patterns, in their distinct green colour palette, are reminiscent of the oversized leaves of exotic plants, which also are the source of inspiration for this series. With a love of materiality, energy and movement, these artworks examine the possibilities offered by painting.
Johannes Hägglund (b. 1993) is part of a young generation of Swedish artists who investigate the classic medium of painting. He earned his master´s degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2020. Even before graduating, he enjoyed well-received exhibitions in Sweden and abroad, and has been awarded several grants. In 2021, his work will be exhibited at Falsterbo Konsthall, among other venues. Johannes Hägglund lives and works in Stockholm.
