Swedish pioneer poet-painter-sculptor Elis Eriksson’s preference for the term producer rather than artist appears quite fitting when navigating this show, the first-ever retrospective exhibition of his work. Eriksson was frenetically productive, churning out texts and drawings, paintings and sculptures, and “combines” and installations at industrial speed. Crucial to his “macklings” and “tjofjäses” (his two- and three-dimensional artworks, respectively) was the development of an alternative orthography, giving rise to a highly idiomatic poetry and fiction that invaded all levels of his work. When Eriksson died this January, just shy of his hundredth birthday, he had radically reinvented himself at least three times. The works that are presented in this exhibition cover different stages in his production, from his “birth” (at age fifty-one) as the familiar artist-producer, through his revelations regarding the nature of language, politics, and power (corresponding to shifts in his work at eighty-one and ninety-one) that led him to reexamine his methods and forge new ways of criticizing and satirizing contemporary culture—always with the same outrageous sense of humor. In its totality, Eriksson’s work is a machine perpetually engaged in a symbolic attack upon its declared enemies: official language and culture, God and king, politicians and police, school and care for the elderly, Bush and “Blär,” and so on. “Massa ande ting” is a well-curated and startlingly vital exhibition of works by an artist who deserves the same international attention as already-canonized Swedish artists such as Dick Bengtsson and Öyvind Fahlström.
