From Barnhusbron in central Stockholm, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad’s name is currently difficult to miss. A building-sized green wrap covers much of the former Stockholm Gasworks at Torsgatan 22, tiled with fragments of his paintings above the words “Collected Works 2016–2026.” The early 20th-century Art Nouveau complex, originally built for the city’s gas and water works, is now the site of the first major exhibition devoted entirely to the visual art of Håstad, better known as the rapper Yung Lean.
Håstad emerged as a teenager in the early 2010s with the Stockholm collective Sad Boys, developing an internet-native strain of rap whose hazy sound and melancholic, hyper-digital imagery would become closely associated with cloud rap and influence a generation of artists who followed. But music was never his only medium. For years, Håstad has painted, drawn, and made objects alongside his recording career, largely outside public view. “Collected Works 2016–2026” brings that parallel practice together on this scale for the first time.
Two days before the official press preview, Artsy was given the building largely to itself for an hour as Håstad’s crew made last-minute preparations. Lean then sat down for a rare interview focused on his visual art. Inside are paintings, drawings, collages, ceramics, dioramas, installations, and the new short film Slåtter (Haymaking), which Håstad executive-produced and stars in. Spread across the building, the works create something closer to a temporary, darkly dreamt habitat than a conventional white-cube exhibition.
Most have never been exhibited. Håstad mounted a small, four-work presentation at Carl Kostyál in Stockholm in 2016, the year that gives this decade-long survey its starting point.
By the time Håstad arrives and we sit down in the backyard, the building is beginning to fill for a friends-and-family evening. His father, the poet and literary critic Kristoffer Leandoer, has just arrived. Håstad knows people are waiting for him, but the conversation is focused. He drinks water from a champagne glass. He has spoken publicly in recent years about sobriety, and there is little sense here of hiding behind the Yung Lean persona. We are speaking primarily to Jonatan, though, as he points out, he does not find the distinction especially useful.
“I’m Jonatan. I created Yung Lean, and I also made all of these artworks,” Håstad told Artsy. “So I think it all belongs together.”
He does, however, see one important difference. His visual work remains less trained and therefore less professionalized. “I like the rawness,” he said. Years of touring taught him exactly where to stand and how a show should sound. “Sometimes you become too pro.”
In fact, the visual side came first. Håstad calls graffiti his “first big love,” an obsession from around the age of 11 or 12. As a child, he would also spend hours drawing and carving small figures from wood. Music never displaced that instinct. Even while producers were still finishing tracks, he recalls, his mind would already be moving toward the music video: the clothes, the lighting, the image around the song.
That visual practice has since expanded into film and acting, including a role in the forthcoming Netflix film Sacrifice, the recent “STORM” video, and a contribution to the soundtrack for the upcoming video game Grand Theft Auto VI.
“The visual side has always been very important to me,” he said. “Visual art came first, and then music came afterward.”
The rawness Håstad describes permeates the exhibition. Figures emerge from blunt fields of color; alien-eyed faces and checkerboards recur from work to work. The large paintings can feel provisional even when densely populated, with passages of drawing, paint, pattern, and empty ground allowed to coexist. A glazed ceramic such as El Jefe (2022) turns the same vocabulary into a lumpy, comic body. In Perfekt Dejt (Perfect Date) (2025), two figures recline amid a dark, highly saturated forest.
That uncanny, slightly unreal atmosphere extends through the building. Music, low light, and daylight slip through half-open windows and move across its exposed industrial walls. A miniature diorama and a separate TV room deepen the sense that Håstad has temporarily occupied the space rather than simply hung work inside it.
Håstad says he became more willing to take risks around 2016, moving among acrylic, oils, oil sticks, ceramics, and video and beginning to work at larger scales. Asked what changed, he is succinct: “I worry less. I care less about what other people think.”
He has never attended art school. His formal training amounts to a two-week clay course at Folkuniversitetet, a Swedish adult-education organization. This is not a deficit he is eager to correct.
“I think there’s something really beautiful about someone who has a job, like, if you’re a plumber, and on the side you make little wooden sculptures,” he said. His music developed through years of practice until it became his profession. “But this isn’t my job, and I want to keep it pure.”
The exhibition nevertheless marks an unmistakable new stage in Håstad’s relationship with the art world. A selection of works, primarily sculptures, will later be sold through the auction house Bukowskis. He sees no contradiction. Håstad has no gallerist and no external curator, and much of the exhibition has been assembled with people he has known since school. His longtime friend Kaj Lindhé Gimdal has helped with both Håstad’s process and the show’s curation; Håstad also shared a painting studio for roughly three years with Benjamin Reichwald, better known as the rapper Bladee.
“If I went to Bukowskis and saw that Robert De Niro had painted a picture, I’d still want to buy it because Robert De Niro painted it,” Håstad said. “In my case it’s always going to be, ‘Yung Lean made this.’ There’s no getting around that. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all.”
For Håstad, the model echoes the way his music career began.
“I entered the music world without a record label or management,” he said. “We just uploaded things online, and it was a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the music industry.”
Some 15 years later, he wants to approach art in much the same way: rent the space, finance it himself, build it himself, then work with an established institution such as Bukowskis where it serves a purpose.
That willingness to engage with the art market does not extend to how Håstad wants the exhibition itself to function. Almost none of the works have been shown publicly before, and admission is free.
“One thing I find boring about the art world is that everything is so gatekept,” he said. “It’s only for rich people, or only for people who are already inside the scene.”
His own celebrity, he argues, makes openness more important, not less. “I’m a fucking famous musician. So, of course this should be open to everyone. It should be free to enter and open for a long time.”
Even visitors who cannot afford an artwork should be able to leave with something small, he said, whether a calendar or a key. “Everyone should be able to take something away with them.”
That independence also informs Slåtter. Håstad traces the film to a soldier’s cottage his mother inherited in Småland, and to childhood encounters with the strange, sometimes frightening imaginative world of Swedish nature. He cites the work of illustrators John Bauer and Elsa Beskow, as well as folklore around mythological trolls Näcken and the invisible spirit Vittra.
“That whole Swedish troll forest becomes very real when you’re a child,” he said. “Then you get older, and you understand what reality is. Somewhere in there, I think I just wanted to get that feeling back in a film.”
As Håstad talks about Bauer’s troll forests and Nordic figures, I mention that Slåtter made me think of Ali Abbasi’s Border (2018). It is, unsurprisingly, a film Håstad admires. He praises the way it places the bureaucratic realities of border control and policing alongside something magical.
Stockholm itself becomes another subject of our conversation. Having lived abroad for many years, I tell Håstad that the city can feel strangely inert despite its beauty, unless you have access to the right social or creative contexts. He partly agrees. The team had discussed staging the exhibition in London or Paris before deciding against it.
“But fuck it. I’m from Stockholm,” he said. “Stockholm made me, and Stockholm is where I want to give something like this back.”
If the exhibition encourages younger artists to find a room of their own, put on shows or concerts, and remain “a little naïve” rather than immediately seeking entry into an established market, he said, “that would be fucking amazing.”
It is a fitting ambition for an exhibition that, viewed from Barnhusbron, looks anything but tentative. Håstad may want to preserve the amateur freedom of making art, but after a decade of doing so largely outside public view, he is no longer keeping it hidden.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/FnMAvxd
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