This painting features a drawing of an old abandoned water tower from my childhood in Torshälla, Sweden.

It's titled Rudolf Meidner, after the renowned Swedish economist. Meidner worked within the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and played a pivotal role in shaping the economic policies of the Social Democratic Party during the post-war era.

He was also the architect behind the employee funds introduced by the government in 1982, despite fierce right-wing opposition. These funds may well have been the last truly socialist program advanced by the Social Democrats in Sweden. The idea was straightforward: to gradually transfer ownership of large companies from private hands to the public, using the companies’ own profits.

Yet the final version of the program fell far short of Meidner’s vision. He dismissed it as “a pathetic rat.” By then, neoliberal ideology had already reshaped public opinion, and the party adapted accordingly. In 1992, the funds were dismantled.

The work features a dried rose hanging from the top of the panel, perhaps referring to the lost promise of social democracy.

Watch a video presentation here.

The series features works with an appendix placed on top of the work or close to it. This object is exterior to the image plane, the illusionary "window" in the picture, but is still an intrinsic part of the whole. It connects or makes visible the two dimensions of an artwork - its inner logic and its relation to its surrounding.
The title references the famous Coca-Cola campaign and Immanuel Kant's notion of the thing in itself. It means that subjects can only experience the phenomena as they present themselves through perception. It is always fundamentally different from what the things are outside language boundaries - in themselves.

Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.

Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.