Ragnar Persson
Jag och mina demoner
21.08—19.09.26

Text på svenska

Gallery Steinsland Berliner presents Jag och mina demoner (transl: Me and My Demons), a solo exhibition of new works by Swedish artist Ragnar Persson. The exhibition marks the artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery.

In Jag och mina demoner, the viewer is invited into Persson’s increasingly distinctive world of drawing, where an enigmatic spruce forest is inhabited by all manner of creatures, from birds of a classifiable kind to strange spirits and demons. The exhibition brings together detailed works on paper in an enveloping installation that invites close viewing.

Persson’s artistic practice is rooted in pencil drawing, making use of the freedom afforded by the medium. The immediacy of a hastily executed sketch, perhaps with a pen at hand on a scrap of paper, is allowed to coexist with and inform Persson’s otherwise meticulously detailed drawings. This duality is pervasive; the woodland landscape that has become a recurring backdrop in Persson’s work is populated by a growing ensemble of characters with distinct temperaments. Delicately rendered birds and swans, as if lifted from old taxonomic illustrations, coexist with elements of a more anarchic aesthetic related to heavy metal.

The allegorical is ever-present in Persson’s work, as it is in much of storytelling. The optimism and vulnerability of youth find expression in the wide-eyed human figures of the drawings. Nature’s double-edged presence emerges in magical starry skies and possible dangers concealed in the darkness. The title Jag och mina demoner suggests both the familiarity the artist has by now established with his drawn figures and the emotional landscape that the forest may, in fact, represent. The exhibition is thus a personal one; an unease that has lingered in the artist’s own life has also found its way into the world of his drawings.

Recurring bell imagery signals a shift in the forest’s former tranquillity. Bells hang from bird beaks and the claws of grinning demons. As a symbol, the bell carries multiple meanings. In a church or town hall, it sounds to mark transitions such as weddings and funerals. In other contexts, its chime is foreboding or awakening. The Baroque poet John Donne’s exhortation, “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” has been quoted frequently since it was written, serving as a reminder of humanity’s interconnectedness in the face of the passage of life and time. In Persson’s drawings, the bells recur as a prophetic motif, yet are allowed to remain ambiguous in the shrouds of darkness.

Ragnar Persson (b. 1980, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. He holds an MFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (SE). Persson is the recipient of the Carl-Axel Valén Foundation’s 2026 award, which includes a forthcoming exhibition at Eskilstuna Art Museum. His previous exhibitions include presentations at Moderna Museet Stockholm, Teckningsmuseet in Laholm and Kulturhuset Stockholm. Persson’s work is represented in several national collections, including the collection of Moderna Museet.