Next to Daisy’s, on Top of the Laundry by Joakim Ojanen

Project: Next to Daisy’s, on Top of the Laundry
Author: Joakim Ojanen
Client: LL'Editions
Type: Publication Design
Year: 2022

Behind a standardized, white door at Strömsätragränd, a magical world reveals itself. Stepping over the threshold, the visitor finds herself surrounded by a myriad of otherworldly creatures of various forms and sizes. In a corner of the room, a choir of small flowers sings a serenade, led by a cheeky duck and in the opposite end of the room, a thin-limbed youngster – far too tall for his supposed age – looms. The adolescent appears to be sad; perhaps afflicted by the immensity of our ambivalent, modern world?

Artist Joakim Ojanen’s studio is like no other studio you will have seen. A far cry from the carefully curated atelier museum in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, which hosts a reconstruction of Giacommeti’s studio or, in closer proximity to the studio of Ojanen; sculptor Carl Eldh’s Ateljémuseum in Vasastaden, Stockholm.

Over the course of two years, the artist has documented his work in the studio with two analogue cameras. Lumps of clay are transformed into fantastical sculptures while exhibitions are being prepared and works are shipped out to different corners of the world. Outside the studio, seasons seamlessly shift and the rays of sun flickering on the walls firmly follows in both frequency and temperature. Roll by roll of film is sent to the lab for developing and a book is starting to take form.

Joakim Ojanen (b. 1985, Västerås) is one of the most successful artists living and working in Sweden today. His work has been the focus of many solo exhibitions, not only around Sweden but in Los Angeles, New York, Cologne, and Tokyo. Joakim Ojanen’s bulbous, off-kilter ceramic sculptures and surreal paintings create an aesthetic universe of unsettling, cartoonish characters. Ojanen began his career as a graffiti artist, then expanded into animation, drawing, and ceramics. His style draws on comic-book imagery and his own childhood. Whereas Ojanen’s work clearly occupies its own very particular space, it has been likened to that of artists like Keith Haring, Philip Guston, Peter Saul and Salvador Dalí.

Next to Daisy’s, on top of the laundry contains 227 photographs by the artist and a text by Jakob Ojanen, artist and brother to Joakim. Working closely with the publisher LL’Editions and the artist, Lundgren+Lindqvist designed the book, which features an open spine and heavy boards of cardboard for the cover. For the front cover, we asked the artist to draw a self-portrait and to handwrite the title for the back cover. Within the book, we devised a system where the artist’s photographs are rendered full-bleed, without ever having to be cropped. With the open spine, the book opens flat throughout, allowing us to center an image on a spread, with another on each side of it. The feeling of leafing through the book is meant to emulate walking around in the studio of the artist.

The special edition of the book is issued with a polished bronze sculpture by Ojanen, titled ‘Studio Key’, packaged in a walnut box with cherrywood intarsia. We designed the box in collaboration with Nadén Arkitektur, and also designed a certificate of authenticity, which was printed with a Posca marker, a pen often used by Ojanen himself, on an AxiDraw drawing machine.

Lundgren+Lindqvist - Next to Daisy’s, on Top of the Laundry by Joakim Ojanen

The sculptures were cast in bronze and polished in Madrid and the boxes were handmade in walnut with cherry wood intarsia in Gothenburg.

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The book was released in conjunction with Ojanen’s solo exhibition at Nanzuka in Tokyo, Japan, in 2022. The special edition of the book sold out in 20 minutes from its release, but the trade edition is still available from LL’Editions.

The book was awarded the prestigious Svensk Bokkonst in 2023, as one of Sweden’s most beautiful books published in 2022. Svensk Bokkonst was founded in 1933, and has been presented every year since 1934, which makes it one of the oldest, still active design awards in the world.

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