The documentation concerning the dismantling of a houseboat

Exhibition the art hall, Moscow Russia 1999

In 1999 I had my first art show in Moscow. When I got the invitation two years earlier that I was welcome to have an exposition in the art hall, Gallery A3, in Moscow I was very exited over the possibility to show my work for a big audience.
At the same time I was worried because I had started to use a new technique. I had a big exhibition in the Culture house of Stockholm with an extremely good photographer named Kia Naddermier. We had been working together with the exhibition, where we tried to get abstract painting and photography to work together. I was painting on a naked model and Kia was using the camera, documenting the wet paint on the skin.
At first we didn’t know how to present the work. We didn’t want anything that was associated with photo nor with paintings so we developed a technique, a monotype on aluminium, to present our work.
The problem was that the art hall in Moscow had only seen my abstract work and not my recently figurative work that was based on photos. I hadn’t given up the abstract painting but I was moving away from it. 

In that time I bought a “new” wreck from 1893, an old ferry boat that would need a lot of care and time before I could use it as my home and studio. I already had a houseboat but that was the kind of houseboat that the local government in Stockholm don’t want to have in the harbours.  So I had to choose between selling the old boat cheap or taking it apart. I had built it myself seven years earlier and it was partly built in aluminium. I was forced by time too, because I couldn’t let it stay where it was…