FRIBOURG.- Kunsthalle Friart presents Charlotte Johannesson’s (b. 1943, Sweden) first exhibition in Switzerland, dedicating the entirety of its space to the artist.

This exhibition follows her recent retrospectives at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and at Nottingham Contemporary, as well her participation at the 2022 Venice Biennale. It marks the rediscovery of a self-taught artist whose career took place mainly on official art system’s fringes.

Charlotte Johannesson lives and works in Skanör, Sweden. Her work explores the affinities between the craft technology of the loom and the digital technolo- gy of computer programming. Af- ter finishing her studies in applied textiles crafts, she developed her textile artistic practice in the 1970s within Malmö’s counterculture scene. In 1981, with her partner Sture Johannesson, she created an experimental digital arts laboratory, the Digital Theatre.

The exhibition at Friart brings together works produced over the last 50 years: textiles, plotter prints, digital slideshows, pain- tings and laces form a constel- lation of recurring patterns. The images created recall her involvement in state satire, hippie culture, punk, cyberculture, towards more cosmic visions. The radical nature of her work makes her a precursor to current post-feminist digital art.

The exhibition presents a wide selection of works representative of the artist’s artisanal work carried out on a loom. It includes major works from her production from the 1960s and 1970s to the recent period

Kunsthalle Friart
Charlotte Johannesson
November 7th, 2023 - February 11th, 2023