Workshop
Workshop was a large-scale solo exhibition by Torbjörn Johansson presented at Verkstad – A Space for Art in Norrköping in 2011.
Site-specific installation, painting, light, sculptural color objects.
Workshop was a large-scale solo exhibition presented at Verkstad in Norrköping, marking the institution’s most extensive presentation to date. For the exhibition, Torbjörn Johansson produced a series of new works and site-specific installations that activated the full spatial capacity of the venue.
Located in a former industrial area, Verkstad’s spaces retain traces of factory use and mechanical labor. These existing conditions—architecture, surfaces, residual marks, and spatial gaps—were integral to the exhibition. Rather than treating the room as a neutral container, the space itself became the ground and material for the work. It is often difficult to determine where one piece ends and another begins; the exhibition unfolds as a continuous spatial composition.
Color is the central medium throughout Workshop—not as surface decoration, but as matter, process, and experience. Johansson works directly with paint and light, pushing the functional limits of different color materials in collaboration with industry specialists. The exhibition includes three-dimensional objects formed from solidified paint, as well as installations where color appears to seep, accumulate, and settle within the architecture.
In a rarely used, enclosed room—its concrete walls and floor still covered with dust and cobwebs—a glossy white paint emerges from ventilation openings high on the wall. The paint appears to have pooled on the floor before the space itself was tilted, causing the white mass to slide away. The result is an environment where gravity seems temporarily suspended, evoking both a disrupted physical logic and the interior of a used paint container.
A recurring palette of nine vivid colors appears throughout the exhibition. Wooden stirring sticks, arranged in precise rows and dipped into different paint containers, bear direct witness to the painting process. In many works, the act of making is explicitly present; the process of becoming is inseparable from the final installation.
Workshop oscillates between control and excess, between fluid and solid states. Paint runs, splashes, and clings—at times recalling childhood play, at others the physical labor of renovation. Light functions alternately as a carrier of color and as a harsh, blinding presence. Throughout the exhibition, contrasts between smooth and rough, liquid and hardened, emphasize color as a shifting condition—two distinct states of perception existing side by side.