...I changed my ticket to New York from the 9th to the 13th September 2001. The 9/11 intervened; I stayed in Sweden and started to work on The Trick …

It was certainly not an illustration or even some comment on Bulgakov’s remarkable book Master and Margarita that drove me on. I only borrowed a personality of sorts

How the painting would look was a mystery to me, though I knew what it should not be. So I painted it again and again... Several versions appeared and finally I carved a large relief in oak, followed by shaping a synthesis of the carving and my painting in clay. The work was completed and cast in bronze at the tradition-rich Bergmans foundry in Stockholm.

I’m surprised at the stubbornness with which I’ve grasped the vision now that I show TRICKET – THE TRICK on September 11 three years later...

AND THEN MY mind plays a joke on me – suddenly, while I’m jotting down these words. I look up the word ‘trick’ in a thesaurus (Longman’s from 1986) and read dupe, cully, gull, cozen, defraud, cheat, bluff, fake.

But it should have been words like prank, caper, stunt, mischief, practical joke, spoof, antics, shenanigans, horseplay, monkey-tricks and tomfoolery.

My eyes fell on the wrong section!

This hitch between what seems to be a TRICK and what the action of TRICKING actually is exposes to me the actual content of the three-year effort.

Catalogue text for an exhibition in Navet (The Hub), Lindholmen Science Park, Göteborg 2003