ArtistSwedish
Sture Johannesson
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Sture Johannesson was born in 1935 in Skanör, a small coastal town at the southern tip of Sweden, and spent much of his early childhood in an orphanage after being placed there at the age of eight. That particular upbringing, marked by institutional control and, reportedly, the use of experimental substances on the children in his care, would resonate through the rest of his artistic output, which consistently circled questions of authority, altered consciousness, and the politics of perception.
He came of age as an artist in the 1960s, when he became part of the Scandinavian wing of the Situationist International. In 1966 he and his wife, the textile and digital artist Charlotte Johannesson, opened the Cannabis Gallery in Malmö - one of the first venues in Sweden to openly engage with countercultural politics. The gallery became a focal point for the emerging underground scene in Skåne and drew both interest and police attention in equal measure.
Between 1967 and 1969, Johannesson produced a series of eleven silkscreen posters printed by Permild & Rosengreen in Copenhagen that became the defining visual documents of Swedish 1968. The most discussed of these was a paraphrase of Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People", in which the allegorical female figure appears naked and smoking a hash pipe - a work that circulated as "The Underground Will Take Over" and was banned from the exhibition it was created for at Lunds Konsthall in 1969. The resulting scandal led to the resignation of the art hall's director, Folke Edwards, who stepped down in protest at the censorship. The posters are now held by MoMA in New York, the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée de l'Affiche et de la Publicité in Paris.
After the Cannabis Gallery closed in 1969, Johannesson pivoted decisively toward technology. He began working with IBM in Stockholm, exploring the computer as a medium for image-making at a moment when very few artists anywhere were doing the same. Together with Charlotte, he co-founded Digitalteatern (the Digital Theatre) in Malmö, a platform for technical and visual experimentation that ran from 1981 to 1985, during which time they produced fractals, symmetry studies, and optically complex graphic works using early personal computing hardware. A later project, the EPICS collaboration with Kallin running from 1986 to 1998, continued this line of inquiry under the title "Exploring PICture Space". His digital work is held by ZKM in Karlsruhe and MACBA in Barcelona.
Johannessen died in 2018 in Skanör, the same town where he was born. On Auctionist, 27 items attributed to him have appeared at auction, with 2 currently active. The market is concentrated among Skåne-based sale rooms: Limhamns Auktionsbyrå accounts for seven lots and Crafoord Auktioner Lund for six, reflecting local archival and estate provenance. Bukowskis Stockholm has also handled several examples. Top sales have reached 2,700 SEK for a signed and numbered lithograph, with silkscreen posters from the 1968-1969 series trading between 1,800 and 2,200 SEK - modest figures that may well shift as interest in early digital art and Scandinavian counterculture continues to grow internationally.