So, something pretty amazing just happened. Swedish artist Jonathan Josefsson literally just changed the way we see and think of rugs. To be honest, prior to stumbling across his amazing textiles, we haven’t really spent too much time pondering the ancient craft of rug making. Now we can’t stop fantasising about what his pieces would look like adorning our floors or, definitely more suitably, our walls. Unless we get our hands on one quick-smart, we have a feeling no other rug in our lives is going to cut it from now on!
Based in Gothenburg, Jonathan comes from a background of graffiti. He’d been throwing pieces up for around 15 years before picking up a needle. Looking at his older work, there is a definite resemblance between his woven and wall pieces. It’s all in the style with his use of free-flowing, organic forms and interesting colour palettes. We’re thinking along the lines of if a Bauhaus-era rug got jiggy with a Kandinsky painting and gave birth to its love child on a mossy green patch in a lush Swedish forest.
Each piece is an abstract, colourful, sculptural landscape, and the fluid forms feel reminiscent of our own biology if it were placed under a microscope. If we sit and look long enough, we start to see nature in all its forms in the organic shapes and vibrant colours; sap in a tree, the age-telling rings hidden inside a tree stump, oil dispersing on top of water, cells in our own body.
The feels go deep, but at the end of the day we’re just dying for a slice of these unreal, cheerful rugs for our own home. We can dream, right?
See more from Jonathan Josefsson on his website and Instagram.
