ArtistSwedish
Mikael Genberg
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Lars Mikael Genberg was born on 28 August 1963 in Västerås, Sweden. His entire artistic output revolves around a single, deceptively simple image: the red Swedish cottage with white corner boards, the house that Swedish children instinctively draw when asked to draw a house. Genberg grew up in one. By taking that deeply ordinary symbol and placing it in locations where it cannot plausibly exist, he has built a body of work that raises questions about shelter, belonging, and the human impulse to domesticate even the most inhospitable spaces.
The first major realisation of this idea came in 1998 with Hotell Hackspett - the Woodpecker Hotel - built 13 metres up in an oak tree in Vasaparken in Västerås. The hotel looked exactly like a classic Swedish red cottage deposited in the branches by some improbable force of nature. Two years later, in 2000, Genberg opened Utter Inn on Lake Mälaren, where guests access a small red house floating on the water's surface and then descend to an underwater bedroom three metres below the lake floor. A third variation, the floating Ooops Hotel off Västra Holmen, extended the series further. Taken together, these works function simultaneously as liveable art installations and as functioning accommodation, collapsing the boundary between art object and inhabited space.
The conceptual ambition behind the series reaches its furthest point in The Moonhouse, a project Genberg began planning in 1999 after learning that the Swedish Space Corporation was developing a lunar lander. The premise - a miniature red Swedish cottage placed on the surface of the moon - transforms a domestic archetype into an instrument of cosmic displacement. An early model was sent to space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-128 mission in 2009. On 15 January 2025, a house the size of a large hand was launched to the moon aboard the ispace Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander. The lander did not survive the descent, but the project attracted international media attention and culminated in Genberg donating a painted version of The Moonhouse - oil and screen print on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, signed and dated 2025 - to the Warsalongen benefit auction at Stockholms Auktionsverk in February 2025, with proceeds going to War Child.
Genberg's work has been exhibited internationally, including at ACC Galerie Weimar in 2009. His practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture, with the red-house motif appearing across all these forms. The auction record on Auctionist comprises 16 paintings, all sold through Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5. No final prices are currently recorded in our database, suggesting the works were offered in lower-estimate sales or that results have not yet been captured. Given the profile generated by the 2025 Moonhouse mission and the Warsalongen appearance, secondary-market interest in Genberg's painted works is likely to grow in the near term.