Jonas Pettersson

Biography

"Whether painting, composing or building interactive arts, I keep returning to the same moment - where precision tips into intuition and something unexpected comes alive."

Jonas Pettersson is a Swedish artist and composer whose practice moves between watercolor painting, contemporary music, analog photography, electronics and digital performance. Raised in a family of artists — his father studied engraving at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, his mother was a photographer — he trained in microcomputer engineering before an artistic career that has spanned continents and disciplines for over three decades.

His watercolors have been exhibited internationally, from Australia and Asia, to Mexico, Europe and the nordic countries. At the Nordic Watercolour Museum he has exhibited a painting robot — one of many projects where he explores the friction between handcraft and technology. He has also built a remotely controlled pipe organ in Australia, grown paper from bacterial cellulose, and created interactive installations using thermochromatic pigments and electronics. As a composer, he writes for chamber ensembles and solo instruments, drawing on spectral techniques and extended instrumental methods. Recent works include Inflections for violin and cello, Spring Equinox for string quartet, and Birds — Thriving Conversations for solo clarinet.

Jonas lives in northern Sweden, where he runs a summer gallery and works as a software developer alongside his art and composing practice.