A Boy I Never Met
Anders Krisár on family, mental illness, and the humanity beyond diagnosis
Anders Krisár is a man of few words. A sculptor, photographer, and composer, he lets his body intuitively guide his creative process, using physical form to explore the humanity that exists beyond diagnosis. Rather than explaining his work, he lets it start the conversation. His sculptures take up their own ground, lingering in the mind long after the first encounter. While his answers are often spare, the questions his work provokes are anything but.
I first met Anders Krisár at his studio during an open viewing. The room was quiet, filled with a heavy, cautious stillness. But the moment Krisár opened up and revealed his own vulnerability, the atmosphere shifted. It was as if he split the room in half, bypassing our defenses and connecting us directly to a shared humanity. Suddenly, we were no longer a group of detached strangers observing art; we were bound by something deeply felt. Our postures softened, our expressions eased, and we felt a collective permission to smile and be ourselves.
We met again a few weeks later at Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, where his work is included in a group exhibition centered on family. High on the wall hangs a golden mask: his mother’s death mask, cast from the gold of his inheritance. The conversation quickly turned to mortality, ritual, and his mother, who lived with bipolar disorder throughout her life. Before she died, she approved the making of the mask. In death, the work has granted her a different kind of visibility. Visitors now step closer to look at her face. They are curious about her. During her lifetime, she was often overlooked.
Death, vulnerability, and absence run through Krisár’s work, yet it never feels hopeless. Just like in his sculpture of the boys split in half, the empty space seems to hold them together, keeping them from falling apart, into a million pieces.
Your work currently on display at Sven-Harrys is part of an exhibition centered on family. Your father’s mental illness and obsessive relationship to art once made you believe you would never become an artist yourself. Yet today, family has become the emotional core of your work. What made you eventually embrace art as a way of expressing yourself?
I never really made the decision to become an artist; it all happened organically. Ideas started coming, and I simply executed them.
Both of your parents struggled with mental illness, but they manifest in your art very differently. While your father’s presence is felt in the shapes and postures of your sculptures, your mother is the subject of two extraordinary masks: Medicine Mom, built entirely from her own prescribed psychiatric pills, and Eva, the death mask cast from the solid gold of your entire inheritance. Why do you think your artistic imagination uses physical form to chase the ghost of your father, while using the actual materials of your mother’s life, and death, to capture hers?
I was much closer to my mother, so there is a larger universe to work with when dealing with my feelings for her. I have always watched my father from a distance, so it feels fitting that I depict him as a young boy standing high up on a diving platform. A boy I never met.
Before schizophrenia, your father was a diver. In several works, you portray bodies caught mid-air, or standing on the very edge of the diving board. What is it about this state of being suspended that keeps returning in your work?
This is my father trying to deal with massive anxiety, and me doing the same, but as an artist portraying him. I don’t usually analyze my own work. In my experience overthinking often pollutes the art.
Many narratives around mental illness focus on the individual experiencing it, while the perspective of those living alongside it is often overlooked. Do you see your work as speaking to those who remain — the survivors around the illness?
My work is a dialogue with my family, and I invite others into that conversation. Just because both of my parents were mentally ill doesn’t mean their feelings were different from anybody else’s. That is why I think the work is universal. My family has experienced a great deal of grief, and I am trying to work through it.
The boys in your sculptures are completely unclothed and deeply vulnerable, and many carry distortions or imprints in their bodies. What interests you about the way one body can seem to carry traces of another?
The body is a trace of all that has happened to it. It’s a very concrete way of researching our existence.
In several works, you split a body down the middle, yet the two halves are still holding hands. What does that image mean to you?
It can have multiple meanings. I still haven’t decided on a single one. It would be unfair to the work.
Your sculptures are extraordinarily meticulous; you can spend days polishing a single detail, like an ear, until the surface becomes almost impossibly smooth. What does that intense, repetitive process bring to you?
I find great relief in being this meticulous. I’m trying to rein in an often chaotic mind with rigorous order and form. Even while answering these questions, I’m running back and forth between my desk and the piano.
Alongside sculpture, you also work with photography and music. How do you decide which medium to use for an idea, and what does each allow you to express that the others cannot?
It’s usually already decided when the idea finds me. Music is a great addition to my practice: I can describe feelings or situations in minute detail while remaining completely anonymous. With visual art I’m more careful with my language, sometimes spending years finding the right form for it.
When a parent becomes defined by illness, there’s a danger that the illness replaces the person entirely. Do you think your work is, in some way, an attempt to recover the human being underneath the diagnosis, not only for your father, but perhaps also for yourself?
I have never defined my parents by their illness, although it was of course a reality. So yes, maybe that is one of the points I am trying to make with my work.
Thank you Anders for the chat and for sharing your work with our readers. If you would like to find out more about Krisár’s work, follow him on Insta and his webpage.
