How do you describe an artist who defines his work as being somewhere “between impossible to describe and conceptual”, who rejects the category of the unnatural, and maintains that evolution cannot be held in check?
The individualist Johann Zetterquist is definitely not an aesthetic privateer. The sketches he is showing at the Künstlerhaus are “proposals (for public art)”. These are designs for public places, even if the projects suggested sometimes adopt the character of autonomous, surreal installations. The lanes of a sketched motorway junction, for example, end in water, because the conceived traffic construction almost completely covers a small-scale island: this is overgrown by artistic feeder roads and exits, a network overrunning the entire surface.
Or is the viewing tower, which – crowned by a parking platform – recommends itself for the more romantic moments of automobile life, more realistic?
Certainly these designs make a determined attempt to iron out the differences between the artificial and the natural. Zetterquist sees nature as art and art – equally clearly – as nature. An insight that is illustrated, naturally, in Zetterquist’s exhibition.
