Jonas Bohlin

Jonas Bohlin stirred feelings and created headlines in 1981 when, as a final year student at Konstfack, he participated in the degree show with the Concrete chair. Rarely, if ever, has a single degree project at any of Sweden’s art and design schools been of such significance. For many people, this object has been a fist in the solar plexus of the functional, “genuine” furnishing culture that developed during the 20th century and its belief in an objectively measureable quality. Since Jonas Bohlin graduated from Konstfack, he has established himself as one of Sweden’s foremost furniture designers and interior architects, nationally and internationally. He followed up the first wave of attention with continually fresh works that have confirmed that his degree project was not just luck, but was the result of an artistic gift combined with strong integrity. His idiom could be described as Bohlinist. It combines a level-headed and rational sensibility with a playful sense of discovery. A piece of furniture’s functionality is respected, but is often given an addition that is not motivated from a practical perspective – and it is this that is uniquely Bohlinist. It is possible that Bohlinist can be defined, but when the object is finished and in front of you, you can see it. It is in the exclusive addition that the difficulty and uniqueness appear and, with the key in your hand, that the naturally simple is discovered. The addition heightens the tone and offers the observer an experience that is out of the ordinary. He places a puffy cushion on a stool so that it almost seems to float and calls it CLOUD. The stool becomes something more, no longer just something to sit on with a number of legs, but it carries the imagination’s associations with the word cloud. What you learn when you meet Jonas Bohlin’s objects and interiors is that what seems to be a brash area can be given an artistic depth and an existential significance. A long row to Paris, that Jonas Bohlin initiated and completed with friends in 1994, resulted in a 1997 exhibition at Färgfabriken in Stockholm, and a collection, both of which had the rousing title LIV (Life). The antipodes meet in Jonas Bohlin’s person and in his furniture and interiors: Then and now, here and there, chaos and control, fear and safety, life and death, spirit and earth. These opposites are a force field, within which creation takes place. Jonas Bohlin is often talked of as a romantic, and it’s true. This is where you meet romance in what, in a slightly banal way, you could call its true shape. However, as the concept has been used so often it is easy to use it wrongly; as Jan Åman has written, the word romantic has been used in too careless a manner about Jonas Bohlin. A comparable lapse is saying that the net lamp is romantic and the concrete chair isn't. Many of Jonas Bohlin’s furnishings and interiors have become modern classics, some of them in the instant they left the craftsman’s hand. These include the above-mentioned Concrete chair, the Slottsbacken cabinet, the Concave sofa and the LAMPA LIV net lamp.