Mikael Olsson

In on | auf the Swedish artist Mikael Olsson undertakes a photographic interpretation of the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron’s and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s temporary pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London. By investigating the traces of their creative processes in their archives, and exploring the relation between the structure and its various contexts, Olsson creates images that follow and go beyond the object—a visual narrative uncovering issues of memory, identity and perception.

The book includes an essay by author Péter Nádas entitled Loaned Landscapes, Borrowed Objects. The Space of the Image and the Image of Space in Mikael Olsson’s Photography.

In his images Mikael Olsson is fascinated by the tension between visual constituents and visual conventions, the reality of perception and the reality of vision, of the concrete and the abstract. Péter Nádas

Mikael Olsson was born in 1969 in Lerum and is based in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied photography at the University of Gothenburg. In his previous work Södrakull Frösakull (Steidl, 2011), he portrays the relationship between man, nature and architecture in a series of images that invoke questions concerning memory, space, time and structures. In addition to solo exhibitions including those at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin/Stockholm, and Arthur Ross Gallery Columbia University, New York City, Olsson has lectured at ETH Zürich.