Parallella världar: Jan Manker

Jan Manker – PARALLELLA VÄRLDAR
A Man in a Pink Hat

The most eye-catching work in Jan Manker’s exhibition Parallella Världar may also be its most enigmatic: Mannen i bilen (The Man in the Car), from 1981. Its eccentric protagonist appears to be in no particular hurry. He is dressed, however, with a certain purpose: a pink hat and yellow jacket, paired with a purple tie. He looks like a man with a plan - and perhaps like someone who has stepped out of one of Stefan Zweig’s more whimsical stories.

But where is he going? To pick up his girlfriend before heading to a show on Broadway? Or is he a private detective travelling incognito? His hair and eyebrows, with their oddly synthetic brown-red hue, do little to dispel the suspicion.

If some of Manker’s paintings from the late 1960s, with their palettes of pink and turquoise, were described by critics as abstract, poetic variations on Pop Art, Mannen i bilen might be seen as their figurative counterpart. There is something distinctly Hockney-esque in its flat imagery and almost edible combination of colours - shades that bring to mind Italian gelato in Sorrento, or the carefully composed pastels of a Wes Anderson film.

This playful, slightly surreal quality is characteristic of one of the two strands running through Parallella Världar, Manker’s second solo exhibition with Belenius. The same strand extends into a series of cut-out wooden panels, where compositions are built up through layers of digital prints and acrylic paint. Together, these works reflect Manker’s long-standing interest in exploring different materials - a practice first expressed in his works with nylon stockings and in his assemblages of the early 1960s.

“The legendary exhibition Movement in Art, featuring Jean Tinguely, Alexander Calder and Robert Rauschenberg among others, at Moderna Museet in 1961 was a huge influence, but so was Niki de Saint Phalle,” Manker recalls during a studio visit a month before the gallery’s opening reception. Two years later, in 1963, he would find himself in New York for an extended stay, moving in the circle around Öyvind Fahlström, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, an experience that would shape his work in the years to come.

That engagement with painting and material continues in the second part of the exhibition, where Manker returns to the canvas in a suite of paintings of snow-covered mountains. Using acrylic paint, he captures their vast and atmospheric presence. “When you paint, you become one with the painting,” he says. He describes the larger formats as creating a physical connection with the image - something that becomes especially apparent in these expansive mountain scenes.

Each work is made with a remarkably limited palette, and every mountain is given its original Sámi name. The combination lends the paintings a certain numinosity, placing them somewhere between the observed and the imagined. Mountains have, after all, long occupied an important place in literature, from Thomas Mann to Katherine Mansfield, serving not only as settings but often taking on a presence of their own, as in The Magic Mountain.

Mansfield wrote The Montana Stories at the Chalet des Sapins in 1921. Her remarks about the Swiss mountains capture something of the peculiar presence they can acquire: “Have you noticed how very smug those mountains look that are covered with snow all the year round? They seem to expect me to be so full of admiring awe.”

– Malin Ebbing, 2026

Jan Manker (b. 1941 in Stockholm) studied at the Royal Institute of Art from 1964 – 1969. He made his debut in 1964 at Galleri Observatorium in Stockholm and held a retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. He has held approximately 60 solo exhibitions across Sweden and participated in around 250 group exhibitions in England, France, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Poland, Hong Kong, and Sweden.

Manker was involved in the planning of Grafikens Hus, which opened in 1996, and participated in its operations until 2007. From 1995 to 1999, he served as curator for the Swedish General Art Association (Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening).

Jan Manker is represented in the collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as well as museums in Norrköping, Gothenburg, Gävle, Borås, Malmö, Örebro, Helsingborg, and Västerås, and the Centre de la Gravure in La Louvière, Belgium.