Presence in the situation is fundamental to Kurt Johannessen´s work. The artist works both with performances, video, photos and installations, and his works are often related to place. Johannessen is concerned with finding situations that can generate qualities he has not experienced before, and frequently minimize to one image and then create microscopic variations within this frame.
Johannessen is also a publisher of artist books. Many of them are text related, but some are based on artwork or photography. The works in his series of Transparent pictures are made of merged photos of pages from picture books, printed on translucent tracing paper. The pictures seem soft and airy, hard and solid at the same time, leaving an impression of abolished gravity.
Every single artwork in the Transparent Series consists of two or more combined photos, and each title refers to the sum of page titles it took to make this picture. The pictures seem related, in their repeating of details or subjects. Yet all of them are unique, the same way all species of this world are both related and at the same time very different from each other. Thus Johannessen subtly suggests that the universe can be described and even understood by looking at the smallest details, and also that we can understand what is close to us by looking beyond the horizon.
