The exhibition in Berlin unfolds through a series of new works that mysteriously punctuate the gallery space. Almost all of the works are serial and consist of modified everyday objects. The title “Respite” emerged from a collaborative dialogue and suggests a moment in time, an interval, a breathing space, or also a practice of allocating exceptional resources toward recovery. The process of titling is exemplary of how Löfdahl's artistic thinking brings our perceptual apparatus into an unexpected relationship with the creation of meaning itself.

The first work encountered is “Every Insurance”, a work is made of altered umbrellas and safety pins that has a bat-like appearance. Following such disruption of things, the work “Untitled” appears on the wall: a vertical line of five wooden broom heads with their horsehair bristles abraded into a waveform texture. At the centre of the main space Löfdahl presents “Uchronia's Seeds”, an installation of reflective glass sheets resting on tubes and foam rollers at an oblique angle. Objects made of sand and corrugated cardboard lay on the glasses, the whole installation is carefully arranged like other-earthly tectonic plates. In the second space of the exhibition hangs “Inclined”, a series of twenty-five works on paper. The artist produced these ink works by bending her body and letting a dyed string fall onto the paper. Through this semi-controlled action, black marks are generated which trigger multifaceted interpretative impulses. Also on view is her earlier sculpture Telluric Touch, broadly described as a reconstruction of feet and shank.

“Respite“ is suffused with echoes of the natural world such as sand and hair, and embodied gestures such as throwing strings or opening an umbrella. They turn the gallery space into a kind of quiet but eccentric and vulnerable landscape. Chance and collision of meanings bestow a diffuse but exact distribution of agency upon the textures and objects. Löfdahl's artefacts thereby seem to exist in a realm indifferent to the exhibition’s scenography and its visitors, and even the anthropocentric limits through which they became art.

Eva Löfdahl was born in 1953 in Gothenburg, and currently lives and works in Stockholm. She recently had a solo show at the project space Veda in Florence (2018). Her work was featured in a 2011 retrospective exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and a solo exhibition at Lunds Konsthall in 2009. Past solo exhibitions include Krognoshuset Lund (2004), Moderna Museet (2002), and Kunstraum Düsseldorf (1998). She has participated in group exhibitions at Göteborgs Konstmuseum (2008), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2007), and Arkitekturmuseum, Helsinki (2002). In 1995 she represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. This is her fifth exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake.


Artist Talk: Eva Löfdahl in conversation with critic and writer Jan Verwoert, June 1, 6 pm.