Johan Engqvist

Johan Engqvist (Sweden, 1990) examines the relationship between painting and other artistic practices such as craftsmanship, design, architecture, and decorative arts. The variety of references and methods from different artistic fields is, for Engqvist, a way to broaden the perception of what painting can be, what he can do with it, and the type of information it can contain. In his practice, he regularly blends abstraction, figuration, and decorative arts.

Engqvist has a special interest in decorative aesthetics found primarily in domestic environments. For him, decorative imagery, often considered passive, refers to the environments we inhabit and the objects that surround us. They constitute the backdrop of our daily lives and lived experiences, allowing most of us to relate to them in different ways, both personally and collectively. Engqvist is also interested in how different types of decorative images are always related to the concept of taste, and how good or bad taste is in turn related to status. The material of the recognizable image, often painted as a pattern, is abstracted to some extent. It is taken out of the context we usually associate it with and presented in a way that is different from what we are accustomed to seeing, making the paintings strangely familiar to us.

Johan Engqvist lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the HDK-Valand Academy of Fine Art and Crafts in Gothenburg. Since then, he has exhibited at Vänersborgs Kunsthalle, NSFW, and Gallery Thomassen, as well as Gallery Helle Knudsen in Stockholm. In 2021, he was part of the Recent Graduates exhibition, also in Stockholm.