Collecting Butterflies

Book / Catalogues BuyAtKlimt02 Monograph

Published: 14.02.2012

Karin Johansson

Text by:: Love Jöhnsson

Edited by:: Karin Johansson

Edited at:: Gothenburg

Edited on:: 2011

Technical data:: 121 pages, soft cover, colour photographs, text in English, 28 x 21 cm

ISBN / ISSN:: 978-91-633-9501-7

Price:: from 50 €

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Inner pages (the gold butterflies)

This book is published to coincide with Karin Johansson’s solo exhibition at the Röhsska Museum for Fashion, Design and Decorative Arts in Gothenburg in October 2011.

I am sitting with a few of Karin Johansson’s butterfly brooches in front of me. After letting one of them rest in my palm for a while, I pin it to my shirt. When a few moments later I look at myself in the mirror, I am struck by the realization of how much these simple events – my fingers’ action on the brooch, the fixing of the pin to my shirt, and the surveying of my image in the mirror – in different ways parallel many of the processes and themes that resonate within the group of work Karin Johansson, its creator, calls The Butterfly Collection.
The meeting of my fingertips with the metal of the brooch carries a distant echo of the patient manipulation to which the artist, using her hands and her instruments, has subjected the material. Pinning the brooch in its place brings to mind how butterflies and other insects are mounted for display and storage in museums and personal collections. And when, adorned by the beautiful brooch, I no longer can resist the impulse to set myself before a mirror, I am reminded of that streak of vanity that permeates all collecting. To this way see oneself with a coveted object is to engage in a particular kind of self-contemplation, one that is closely connected to the desire to have the relationship between oneself and the object affirmed.

Collecting means not just procuring things. It is also about cherishing the dream of a totality transcending its parts, of a collection larger than oneself.
As a phenomenon, collecting is coupled with an urge to order and arrange things, establish connections, and create images. In all this, the notion of growth and increase is elementally present. For a true collector, collecting will never end and the collection will never be complete.
/ Love Jönsson, Curator at the Röhsska Museum for Fashion, Design and Decorative Arts, Gothenburg.

The book was published in coinciding with Karin Johansson´s solo exhibition at the Röhsska Museum for Fashion, Design and Decorative Arts in Gothenburg in October 2011.

Concept and Design by Happy F&B
Photography by Johan Hörnestam
Translation by Timo Lyyra
Printed by Göteborgstryckeriet

The publication is part of the graphic design collection of Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum Munich.