Untitled

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Sture Johannesson

1993

Lithograph

Description

This lithograph from 1993 showcases Sture Johannesson’s mature engagement with digital aesthetics and printmaking. A central vertical axis organizes bands of magenta, cyan, and yellow, radiating outward in a mirror-like symmetry that balances motion and structure. The core and edges of these bands reveal pixelated, hatched textures, suggesting digital posterization or image compression, while the bold, synthetic palette recalls the artist’s psychedelic poster art of the 1960s.

Johannesson, then in his late fifties, had long bridged countercultural concerns and computational experimentation in his native Sweden. In 1969, he wrote a letter to the IBM head office in Stockholm, leading to several decades of close collaboration with the engineer Sten Kallin to experiment with combining analog and digital picture-making techniques. Their partnership resulted in the Fields Program, a technical study of composition and the coexistence of elements on a picture plane.