Michael Johansson’s play with proportion and the interplay between fine art and popular culture creates thoughtful and uplifting works of art. For anyone who has made a model airplane or any other plastic model, his works spark instant recognition – model parts on the classical plastic frames, but in human scale meet the viewer. You instantly want to touch them, to pry them from their plastic frame like their toy counterpart. Thus playing with our relationship to art and popular culture, Johansson reframes the world and the things we believe belong together in new and surprising ways. With his characteristic sculptural cubes and installations made from similarly colored design objects, some rarer than others, he creates a visual map of design today, and visually striking sculptures in and of themselves. By recomposing our everyday environment, he makes us look at the world around us and the objects that we choose to surround ourselves with in a new light, seeing their form and beauty with fresh eyes and truly appreciating the splendor of the world around us. By incorporating design objects from especially the last half of the 20th century, and showing how they integrate visually with even the most mundane objects like ring binders and storage boxes, he shows the nuances of design history, draws out attention to it and creates an aesthetic unit from the last decades of the 20th century, showing that it is actually more visually coherent than we sometimes think. Born in Trollhättan, Sweden, in 1975, Michael Johansson holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy, a BFA from The Art Academy in Trondheim, and has studied at the Royal College of Art in Stockholm and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. He has exhibited at museums and galleries all over the world since 2003, including in Museum Voorlinden in The Netherlands, Nationalmuseum Design, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden (with his solo This Side Up), Kristinehamns Konstmuseum in Sweden, Göteborgs Konstmuseum in Sweden, Designmuseum Ghent in The Netherlands, Helsinki Contemporary in Findland, Galerie Enrique Guererro in Mexico City, FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph Galerie in Berlin and many more.