Focus
Galerie Nordenhake focus on Karlavägen 20, Stockholm, is a sealed exhibition room visible in its entirety from the exterior highlighting a single artwork. In its focus on individual artworks the space acts as a counterpoint to the ongoing exhibition program at the main gallery space at Lützengatan.
The space is accessible by appointment.
-
Focus: Frida Orupabo »Big girl I«
Orupabo’s incisive work unearths violences in historic photographic and popular archives as well as contemporary digital media. She draws from personal experiences that are deeply intertwined with shared, collective experiences, reimagining these difficult images into otherworldly collages, videos, and sculptures. This process is rooted in a photomontage tradition where she manipulates, cuts, arranges, inverts and loops images. Powerful as they are, these interventions create imaginative and poignant reworkings of motifs that seek to challenge colonial notions still embedded in social, economic and political structures, enabling a sensitive examination of subjects such as race, gender, sexuality, and familial bonds.
Orupabo’s latest solo exhibition, Daily Encounters, her third with the Stockholm gallery, will be opening April 16 on Lützengatan 1.
Frida Orupabo was born 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway. She lives and works in Oslo.
Orupabo will present two solo exhibitions in 2026, at the Museum of Contemporary Art – MAC/CCB, Lisbon, and Kunsten, Museum of Modern Art Aalborg. Recent solo shows include Sprengel Museum, Hanover and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (both 2025); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2024); Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022); Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2021); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both 2019). Orupabo participated in the MOMENTA Biennale d'art contemporain x VOX, centre de l'image contemporaine in Montréal (2025); the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024); the Okayama Art Summit (2022); the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021) as well as the 58th Venice Biennale (2018). In 2025, Orupabo received the SPECTRUM Internationaler Preis für Fotografie for her photographic and collage based practice.
Her work is included in the collections of Mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria; VERBUND Collection, Austria; Instituto Bernardo Paz, Brazil; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Centre national des arts plastiques, France; Kadist Foundation, France/USA; DZ BANK Kunststiftung, Germany; Alexander Tutsek-Foundation, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Germany/Austria; KIASMA, Finland; Turku Art Museum, Finland; Jumex Museum, Mexico; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands; Kistefos Collection, Norway; Nasjonalmuseet, Norway; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Norway; A4 Arts Foundation, South Africa; Scheryn Collection, South Africa; Foundation ARCO, Spain; Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Museum Rietberg, Switzerland; Tate, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, UK; Bronx Museum, USA; Dean Collection, USA; Guggenheim Museum, USA; LACMA, USA; Marieluise Hessel Collection, USA; Perez Art Museum, USA; Studio Museum in Harlem, USA.
-
Focus: xiyadie »Rendezvous at the Pavilion«
Xiyadie, Rendezvous at the Pavilion, 2025. Papercut with water based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, wooden frame. 157 x 157 x 5 cm. Photo: Viktor Sjödin
Xiyadie’s Rendezvous at the Pavilion (2025) portrays a pair of lovers uniting beneath the moonlight in the pavilion, looking tenderly into each other’s eyes as their fingers intertwine. “When you love someone, it seems that no matter how many pairs of hands you have, you cannot get enough of one another,” remarks the artist.
The work derives its title from the eponimous Shaanxi Qinqiang opera (《臺亭相䨝》), set during the Song Dynasty, telling the story of two lovers who were separated due to persecution by those in authority, before reuniting in the flower pavilion after a long separation. In Xiyadie’s restaging of the opera, the pavilion is reimagined as a secret meeting place for gay lovers, where they can freely express their unspoken affections.
Xiyadie (b. 1963, Weinan, Shaanxi Province, China) is a self-taught traditional Chinese papercut artist whose works narrate his journey of transformation and homoerotic fantasies. His works are currently on view at Tate Modern’s collection exhibition Artist and Society. Solo exhibitions include venues as The Drawing Center (New York, 2023), Flazh! Alley Art Studio (Los Angeles, 2012), and Beijing LGBT Center (2010), among others. The artist was featured in the Main Exhibition of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Foreigners Everywhere. Xiyadie has also participated in the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in 2019, and the 12th Gwangju Biennale in 2018.
Xiyadie has taken part in group exhibitions at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2024), Para Site (Hong Kong, 2024, 2017), Macalline Center of Art (Beijing, 2024), ICA NYU Shanghai (2023), Kunsthal Gent (2023), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2022), Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, 2020), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2019), Taipei MOCA (2019), and Östasiatiska museet (Stockholm, 2012), among others.
His work is present in the collections of KADIST, France/USA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, USA, Östasiatiska museet, Sweden, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil, Spencer Museum of Art in the University of Kansas, USA, Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong, Tate Modern, UK, and Cheng-Lan Foundation, Hong Kong.
-
Focus: Manuel M. Romero »Unt«
Unt, 2025, oil, spray and collage on canvas, 280 x 220 cm
Manuel M. Romero’s work centers on the mark as both a spatial and temporal reference. A mark fixes a place and delimits a territory, while at the same time projecting a future return, functioning as a rehearsal for time to come. His work is self-referential, constantly alluding to its own creative process, constantly studying composition, rhythms, tensions, and textures.
Romero prefers working with oil, a material with long drying times which allows for multiple revisions. A material susceptible to change, Romero invites the accidents, chances and repetition of elements. He never works with sketches, and often paints both vertically and hoizontally, or on the floor, painting from above.
Romero’s works evoke a dense and layered sense of time, built from accumulated memories that demand slowness, attention, and duration. A constant tension unfolds between the power of large, materially charged surfaces that impose themselves in space and the subtle, sometimes barely perceptible traces and residues that absorb the viewer’s gaze.
They establish a relationship that approaches the sculptural, overflowing the flatness of the wall through their material density, layered surfaces, and physical formats. As a result, they challenge the conventional boundaries of painting, operating as spatial presences as much as images.
Manuel M. Romero (born Sevilla, 1993) is a contemporary Spanish painter whose work explores abstraction, visual silence, and the essential elements of painting itself. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Sevilla.
Romero has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Galerie Filiale, Frankfurt, Galería Juan Silió, Madrid (both 2025), Centro Párraga, Murcia, (2024), and Artnueve, Murcia, (2021), and has participated in international art fairs such as ARCO Madrid, ARCO Lisboa, and Art Brussels. His work has also been included in significant group exhibitions in museum contexts, such as at the Museo Arqueológico de Murcia, (2025) and CCCC Valencia (2024). His paintings form part of prominent public and private collections including the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Fundación Cisneros Fontanal, DKV, Colección Bragales, Colección Kells, Colección Yera, Colección Carmen & Lluís Bassat, and Colección SCAN.
-
Focus: Nicole Khadivi »Anatomy of an After, pt 1«
Nicole Khadivi, Anatomy of an After, pt 1, 2026
Nicole Khadivi is a Stockholm-based artist working with installations where light, glass, and movement create spatial animations. Grounded in lens-based art, her practice returns to the materiality of the image — glass and light — at a time when image-making is increasingly detached from physical reality. She constructs optical machines without memory, using engravings, reflections, and mechanical sequences in which images exist only as light passing through glass and are registered solely by the viewer’s eye, making the human body an active part of the work.
Her installations explore time, perception, and memory, drawing on personal memory fragments as well as influences from physics, astronomy, mathematics, and psychology. In an era when images can be created without having occurred, Khadivi’s work seeks to unfold image and time, drawing attention to the machines that shape our perception of the world.
Anatomy of an After, pt 1 consists of 29 glass sheets, several engraved with horizons of ruins from an abandoned town in Sicily – an echo of the silence left by an earthquake. Through the transparent layers, a stratified landscape emerges, where light moves between the remnants of what once was. A light source rotates like a helicopter propeller, inspired by the sensation of flying over a place or drifting through memories. The work captures a moment suspended between decay and stillness, where the contours of memory slowly dissolve into the glass.
Nicole Khadivi (b. 1998) graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2024 and has also studied at Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her work has been exhibited at institutions both in Sweden and internationally and her short films have screened at film festivals such as the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany and the Gothenburg Film Festival. Upcoming exhibitions include India Art Fair.
-
Focus: Karl Norin »Glasses«
Karl Norin, Glasses, 2024, faux fur and metal object vacuum-cast in clear resin, 190 x 140 cm
Glasses is part of a recent series where Norin for the first time introduces metal objects in the works. The instantly recognisable and everyday objects, such as scissors, metal hangers, keys and here glasses, found in the alien landscape acts as remnants of a person, a home, a life. They suggest actions but are also themselves agents that instigate a narrative.
Norin’s artefacts are trapped in time, like a mosquito from another era encased in amber. On their plush polyester topography these personal items are misplaced and adrift - detritus of an absent-minded protagonist that left the scene some time ago.
Karl Norin b. 1982 Fjällbacka, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm.
Norin holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Solo shows include Left at ISSUES (2024); True Crime at ISSUES (2024); Karl Norin at Market Art Fair, Stockholm, Sweden (2022); Justitia at Belenius, Stockholm (2018), and Soosh Soosh… at Bill Brady, Miami, USA (2015). Group shows include Ghost in the Machine curated by Erik Berglin at Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg (2022); Downtown Issues III at ISSUES, Stockholm (2025); Downtown Issues II at ISSUES, Stockholm (2023); Downtown Issues at ISSUES, Stockholm (2021); ISSUES #4 at ISSUES, Stockholm (2017), Malmö Sessions with Carl Kostyál, Malmö, Sweden (2019); Friends in Need (2016) and Meet Your Maker (2014) at Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, and Swedish Art: Now! at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum, Stockholm (2016). His work is represented in numerous private and public collections such as the SEB art collection.
-
Focus: Allan Weber »Untitled«
Allan Weber, Untitled, 2023, Kraft paper, lunch bags, 53 x 27 x 12 cm, 20 7/8 x 10 5/8 x 4 3/4 in
Allan Weber is a multidisciplinary artist born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he currently lives and works. His practice spans assemblage, installation, sculpture, and photography, embracing the ambiguity, chaos, and intensity of urban life by transforming everyday materials into sharp poetics and social commentary. By bringing objects loaded with memory into the exhibition space, Weber opens a window into the realities he both experiences and imagines.
Weber repurposes the material ephemera of his home environment and culture while asserting the legitimacy of these objects and contexts as foundations for artistic production. Hailing from 5 Bocas, a favela (self-built informal settlement) in Rio de Janeiro, his practice not only reflects his origins but insists on occupying spaces historically closed off to people from the periphery, both socially and geographically.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Weber worked as an app-based food delivery rider to support his artistic practice. This experience became central to his work, raising questions about commerce, service, social class, and labor under platform capitalism. In 2024, during an artist residency in the UK facilitated by Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion, he revisited this research by once again working as a delivery rider, this time as a foreign worker navigating unfamiliar streets. There, he connected with other immigrants, many of whom relied on gig economy labor as their only means of survival. Despite language barriers, he found that shared experience fostered a powerful sense of community and mutual recognition.
Rather than offering a detached critique, Weber’s work celebrates the beauty and complexity of everyday life and the ways in which objects become charged by human experience. This is evident in works that draw on the tarpaulins that once sheltered baile funk street parties, the motorcycle seats that carried delivery riders to exhaustion, and the brown paper bags used to transport meals across the city. These elements are transformed into visual and poetic forms, giving visibility and protagonism to ways of living that, though shared by many, are often overlooked.The brown paper snack bags, for instance, recur throughout Allan Weber’s body of work: they appear in the photographs from the 2020 series Tamo junto não é gorjeta [We’re in This Together Isn’t a Tip]; are reimagined as brass sculptures, where their folds and creases are accentuated through a geometric sensibility; and reemerge as objets trouvés in assemblages that combine constructive and playful qualities.
About the creation of these sculptural pieces, the artist comments:
“After so much contact with these lunch bags, I started to see them as sculptures, as a kind of social body of the city. After opening, photographing, delivering, and receiving so many of them, I began to perceive them as sculptural objects. They really caught my attention. The creases, the lines, all those marks of use that formed on the paper made me see them as bodies too. That’s where these works were born. Besides, these paper bags are disposable, right? People interact with them just to get to what’s inside. They tear them open, throw them away, toss them in the street, no one cares. Just like our bodies, the bodies of the delivery workers.”
By bringing these repurposed and reconfigured materials into the gallery space, Weber not only documents a particular reality but elevates it. His work is a quiet yet forceful gesture of presence and affirmation—an appreciation of the mundane, the neglected, and the invisible within a world of constant motion and transformation.
Through conceptual practices, Allan Weber (b. 1992, Rio de Janeiro) brings history-laden materials and objects into exhibition spaces, offering a window into the realities he both experiences and envisions. Having begun his artistic research by exploring the cultural and social dynamics of the city of Rio de Janeiro, his focus has since expanded to approach global geopolitics.
In 2020, he founded Galeria 5 Bocas, a contemporary art space within the favela he lives. The space also hosts its own local youth soccer team, furthering Allan's interest in blending his conceptual practice with his community and everyday life. With a creative process that involves social negotiation of power structures, Weber engages with local dynamics to transformatively address aspects of the global social order.
In 2024, Allan Weber received the SEED Award granted by the Dutch foundation Prince Claus Fund and completed an artist residency in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with support from Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion.
His exhibitions include: Allan Weber: My Order (Solo, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 2025); Allan Weber: Novo balanço (Solo, Galatea/Central Galeria/IAB, São Paulo, 2024); The Disagreement: A Theatre of Statements (Group, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna, 2024); Funk: um grito de ousadia e liberdade (Group, Museu de Arte do Rio — MAR, Rio de Janeiro, 2023); Fazer o moderno, construir o contemporâneo: Rubem Valentim (Group, Inhotim, Brumadinho, MG, 2023); Histórias brasileiras (Group, MASP, São Paulo, 2022); A gente precisa se ver pra acreditar que é possível (Solo, 5 Bocas, Rio de Janeiro, 2021); Rebu (Group, Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, 2021); Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece (Solo, Dízimo A Noiva, Rio de Janeiro, 2020).
-
Focus: Sarah Crowner »Coastal«
Coastal, 2021, acrylic on canvas, sewn, 203.2 x 177.8 cm, 80 x 70 in
Traversing the fields of the applied and fine arts, she maintains an approach to image-making guided by experimentation, immediacy, and spontaneity. Using the process-based logic of collage, Crowner carefully builds her paintings by rearranging and sewing painted and raw panels of cut and shaped canvas, thus connecting painting with the physical and the corporeal. She has often installed them as backdrops or props for performances or placed them alongside tiled floors and platforms, thus opening up the paintings to their environment and finding ways of integrating time and motion into the medium of painting. Crowner’s most recent such collaboration on Pam Tanowitz’s new dance, "Pastoral", together with the composer Caroline Shaw, at the Fisher Center at Bard College in June 2025 received great acclaim.
Architecture, fashion, nature, art history, are all subject to Crowner’s taxonomic process from which magnified details emerge to populate her sewn canvases with the same impetus as the first flowers of spring. In her solemn attentiveness, Crowner takes apart the physical world around her and studies its parts in depth, in a pursuit of understanding what makes it tick; all the while teaching us to appreciate abstraction as craft and nature as technique.
-
Focus: Teresa Baker »Willow Creek«
Willow Creek, 2025, yarn and buffalo hide on astroturf, 245 x 154 cm
Teresa Baker (1985) was born in Watford City, North Dakota and is a Mandan/Hidatsa artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes
Baker is currently having a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Previous prominent solo exhibitions include American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, COMA Gallery, Sydney (both 2025); The Arts Club of Chicago; Broadway Gallery, New York (both 2024), de boer, Los Angeles (2023, 2021); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2023); Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona (2022); Pied-á-terre, San Francisco (2021). In 2016 she had her first solo museum show with The Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont.
In October 2025, her work will be presented in a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. Previously, she has exhibited in group shows at Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels (2025); Prospect.6, New Orleans (2024); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park (both 2023); Ballroom Marfa, Texas, and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, California (both 2022).
Her work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Forge Collection, New York; and The Tia Collection, Santa Fe.
Baker has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Guggenheim Foundation in 2025, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Fogo Island Arts, both in 2022. She was the recipient of the Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation in 2020, The Tournesol Award Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2013–2014 and Artist in Residence at The MacDowell Colony in 2015.
Baker holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA from Fordham University.
-
Focus: Lars Englund »Pars pro toto«
Pars pro toto, bonded carbon fiber strips, 237 x 136 cm
Galerie Nordenhake commemorates the recent passing of Swedish artist Lars Englund with a presentation of Pars pro toto — a seminal work in his acclaimed exploration of form and space. The title, translated from Latin as "a part taken for the whole," is a rhetorical and artistic device in which a single element stands in for an entire concept or structure.
Englund embarked on his own road in the 1960s, inspired by the materials of modern industry – plastic, rubber, concrete and, later on, carbon fibre. Using these raw materials he has created sensuously expanding structures where the materials take on a life of their own.
These playful explorations of the basic elements of sculpture oscillate stupendously between the micro and macro perspectives, with their endlessly growing formations. Englund is considered to be one of the most formally adept pioneers of Swedish 20th century art.
Not many of us are aware that until recently we have had a few of his smallest creations in our wallets: the terse, stylised 50 öre and one krona coins launched in 1976.
Exhibition text, Lars Englund, 4.6 2005 – 4.9 2005, moderna museet
-
Focus: Cecilia Edefalk »Self-Portrait, 1993/2011«
Cecilia Edefalk, Self-Portrait, 1993/2011, gelatin silver print, selenium-toned, 211 x 141 cm
Galerie Nordenhake is proud to present Self-Portrait by Cecilia Edefalk—one of the artist’s most iconic and celebrated works.
Cecilia Edefalk’s intuitive and deeply personal practice often draws from things that she encounters in her everyday life. Her approach fuses the intimate and the analytical. The choice of topics often emerges from a rigorous, uncanny intuition that she hones to undertake serial explorations of a single motif, experimenting with duplication, scale, and installation.
Edefalk views repetition as a means to express different ideas. She isolates transitory moments of perception, multiplying and dividing the forms that emerge from them.
In the work *Self-Portrait Edefalk stands with a revolver in one hand, pointing at the observer. In the other she holds a camera shutter release. As she aims at the camera lens, she snaps a self-portrait. Cecilia Edefalk threatens to shoot herself the moment she takes the picture. She seems to be destructively erasing herself in both images.
-
Focus: Paul Fägerskiöld »Memory Palace«
Memory Palace, 2024, oil and graphite on canvas with ash frame, 274 x 170 cm
In Fägerskiöld’s work, fields of colour serve as ground for line drawings of shelving compartments. Using the basic building blocks of painting, Fägerskiöld explores the act of image-making. His practice itself poses the question – why paint? For Fägerskiöld it is part of the process of generating meaning – making language. The thing and the picture of the thing.
As always in conversation with art history, Fägerskiöld relates to a matrix of painterly touch points. Here the motif exist partly in dialog with the 18th century Korean painting tradition of Chaekgeori (books and things) which depicted shelves containing objects of esteemed cultural value, scholarship and learning.
In that same tradition Fägerskiöld compresses the three-dimensional composition to flatten the pictorial plane. The combination of line in perspective over monochrome hues evokes the Italian Renaissance rivalry between Disegno (drawing, structure, perspective, localised in Florence with artists like Michelangelo and Raphael) and Colore (colour, characterised by Venetian painters Titian, Giorgione and Tintoretto).
-
Focus: Magnus Wallin »NO.«
NO., 2023, white painted skull, 21 x 14 x 15 cm
Magnus Wallin’s work NO. is based on a reading consisting of a real material in interaction between the letter N and the shape of a circle in a skull. The white colored skull integrates with the surrounding white cube of the focus space. Installed at a height of 170 cm it gives the impression of standing behind a person, the unease further emphasized by its awkward angle.
Despite the gravity of the subject and main material, Wallin’s artistry is permeated with a dark humour – a brutal playfulness both inviting and repulsing. With a light handed approach for mortality and an unsentimental attitude to our physical constituents, Wallin reveals the belief system that governs the classification and politicisation of the body.
Since the 1990s, Wallin has been a pioneer, both in his groundbreaking use of video animation, from its early origins, and his approach to the body as a site of ideology and political transaction. To see his work is to follow an Odyssey through the different interpretations of the human body through the history of Western art, illustrating the bodily norms of our age and 'the other'.
-
Focus: »Study for the Rose Window at Saint-Denis«
Study for the Rose Window at Saint-Denis, 2023, 4 LED lamps, fixtures and filters, 145.8 x 154 cm
Working in watercolor, drawing, sculpture, photography, and installation, Spencer Finch attempts to faithfully recreate his impressions of natural phenomena and the landscapes that surround him. The artist observes, documents, and studies color and light effects with scientific precision. He distills his findings into ethereal works—most notably large-scale installations that filter or transform natural light, or create synthetic light effects. For example, in The River That Flows Both Ways (2009), a commission for New York City’s High Line, he painted 700 individual panes of glass in different shades of blue to reflect subtle chromatic changes in the Hudson River over 700 minutes in a single day. His pieces consider how history, memory, and sensory subjectivity shape individual perceptions. Finch has installed public works in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has been the subject of exhibitions around the world. Finch’s work belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the GuggenheimMuseum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
-
Focus: Minjung Kim »Mountain«
Mountain, 2022, ink on mulberry Hanji paper, 148 x 185 cm
Minjung Kim is a South Korean artist who explores the connection between hand gestures, the body, repetition, and the mind, through the use of watercolor, ink, and the principles of calligraphy. She is best known for her ink paintings, as well as her subtle formal compositions on layered paper. Committed to re-interpreting traditional Korean aesthetics, Kim employs a process-based organization of her thoughts, problems, and whims in each of her artworks.
Kim chooses materials that, given their nature, allow her to explore and alter their states. In most of her works, Kim uses hanji traditional Korean paper, handmade and produced from the inner bark of the paper mulberry, a tree native to Korea called “dak” that grows in the Rocky Mountains.
The hanji paper is grouped and glued in layers, which can then be torn or burned, allowing us to see the network of paper fibers that make up Kim’s pieces. The use of paper is a dialogue and a synchronization between body and matter for the artist. Always aware of her own physiognomy— its scale, strength and delicacy —, Kim manipulates and modifies the hanji paper, a material that can be easily destroyed while being a strong and long-lasting.
-
Focus: Lap-See Lam »Tales of the Altersea (Starboard)«
Lap-See Lam, Tales of the Altersea (Starboard), 2023, brass, neon, blockout paint, 45.7 x 71.1 cm
In the work, Tales of the Altersea (Starboard), Lam delves into almost magical imaginations of Chinoiserie, defined by imperialist trading, while reflecting on the reality of migration to both claim ownership of and complicate the idea of cultural heritage – a duality that characterises the artist’s mythical installations. Together with the works Port, Stern, and Bow – the other neon sculptures in the suite – it traces the outlines of the dragon head and tail at the bow and stern of the ship Sea Palace.
Tales of the Altersea, as told by the artist, centre around The Sea Palace, a dragon-shaped, three-story floating restaurant, a dragon-shaped, three-story floating restaurant that sailed from Shanghai to Europe in the early 1990s. Now retired, the ship served as a haunted house at Stockholm's Gröna Lund amusement park until recently. Its journey and aesthetic, anchored in a historic reality, inform the artist’s fictional narrative and materialise the works.
-
Focus: Erik Thörnqvist »Natural Born Sitter«
Erik Thörnqvist, Natural Born Sitter, 2024, polished stainless steel, pipe fittings, jesmonite, 210 x 60 x 55 cm
The cantilevered design, with its elegant defiance of gravity, evokes a time when form and function were inextricable from the hope of a better future. But as this chair stands today, it speaks to a modernism that has been sanitized, untethered from its political roots. Yet, what was once a radical break with tradition has now been transformed, the raw force of its history softened by time, polished into a commodity. Natural Born Sitter subtly questions how these once-disruptive symbols of the machine age have been absorbed into our culture, their revolutionary spirit muted, their legacy repurposed as monetary and aesthetic capital.
Through sculpture and installation, Erik Thörnqvist's body of work delves into historical and fictional narratives to unearth how an idea takes a material form. The blurring of what is fixed, or the collapse between fiction and fact, serves as a point of departure in his artistic practice. He aims to communicate this in his works as a spectrum and a gradient of experiences and possibilities, rather than as polarizing opposites. It reflects the idea of taking a misstep or how the omission of narration leaves space for something to be filled in.
Thörnqvist is captivated by the intricate connections between ideas, politics, and ideology and the ways in which they materialize. He is intrigued by the metamorphosis of a sketch on a designer’s notepad into a tangible object like a chair, or by how the rhetoric of a politician transforms into a housing project that becomes the lived reality for people. The materialization of ideas serves as a point of reflection on the dominant ideologies and power structures in our society, and he seeks to explore these intersections and manifestations in his work.
-
Focus: Ernesto Burgos »Balandro«
Ernesto Burgos, Balandro, 2024, fiberglass, resin, cardboard, wood, charcoal, oil paint, 122 x 152 x 13 cm
Ernesto Burgos’ works bring the enthusiasm of Abstract Expressionism into the third dimension with gravity-defying forms that harness the tension between painting and sculpture. His wall-based sculptures serve as a conduit for his ongoing exploration of transformative dynamics, stemming from earlier experiments with regular, everyday objects that delved into the boundless potential of materials.
Burgos employs a diverse array of industrial materials such as cardboard, fiberglass, and resin, meticulously subjecting them to a repetitive process involving tearing, cutting, bending, and adhesive manipulation. This harmonious interplay between materials results in unexpected transformations, often extending beyond the artist’s precise control. Material manipulation combines with chance to give rise to fluid forms that capture motion in a suspended state. The rapid mark-making techniques employed by Burgos play with the sculptural forms and enhance the illusionary spatial dimensions of his work, continually shifting and evolving with each change in perspective. His distinctive approach blurs the boundary between artistic mediums, transcending the traditional constraints of materiality and contemporary sculpture.
-
Focus: Joe Fyfe »Untitled«
Joe Fyfe, Untitled, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 214 x 178.5 cm
Joe Fyfe (b. 1952, Staten Island, NY) was educated at Philadelphia College of Art and immediately moved to New York City upon graduation in 1977. His work was first included in the historical exhibition The Times Square Show in 1980. He had his first solo exhibition of imagistic, metaphorical figurative paintings at Barbara Toll Gallery in NYC in 1983. Fyfe has exhibited internationally for four decades, he has shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Christian Lethert, Köln, Albert Baronian, Brussels, Acme, Los Angeles, Ceysson & Benetiere in Luxembourg and Geneva, Nathalie Karg and Cheim and Read and most recently at Peter Blum gallery in New York. His work has been awarded many prizes, including a Guggenheim, from The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Artadia award, and several Pollock-Krasner and Adolph Gottlieb awards. He also, most recently received an award for Art Journalism form the Rabkin Foundation. In addition to his studio practice Fyfe is a Professor of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
-
Focus: Ayan Farah »RA«
Ayan Farah, RA, 2013-2018, marigold on linen, sun faded, 270 x 180 cm
Some years ago, Farah restlessly sought a more nomadic way of working in response to a sedentary life in the studio. She carried fabrics that could absorb pigments, minerals and matter from the places she visited: China, Gotland, the Dead Sea, Iceland, Mexico, and Western Sahara to name a few. She then inverted the process, taking raw materials back to her studio to be mixed and brewed for months, even years. Farah sources the fabric itself from antique textile dealers: heirlooms, from pristine household sheets to threadbare hostel bedlinens. Some fragments bare embroidered initials that hark back to a history of family lineages. Although not explicitly political, issues of power, property, trade, territory and colonial relations permeate her practice.
Born in 1978 in Sharjah, UAE, to Somali parents, Ayan Farah was raised in Sweden and studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Moving back to Stockholm in 2020, some of her international career highlights include the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Tarble Arts Centre in Charleston, the Klein Collection in Germany, and Galeria Casas Riegner in Bogotá. Her work is included in the collections of The Kadist Foundation, the Roberts Family Foundation, Public Art Agency Sweden, and Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, among others. Farah participated in the Black Rock Senegal 2022 Artist-in-Residence program, founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley. She has been featured in group exhibitions in places such as Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2024); El Espacio 23, Miami, US, and Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy (both 2023); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2022).
-
Focus: Antoine Renard »Trauma Queen«
Antoine Renard, Trauma Queen, 2024, 3d printed glazed ceramic, metal, 230 x 45 x 45 cm
The morbid and witty title, combined with the gruesome aesthetics of Renard's work problematises the subject while, at the same time, the sculpture represents a core example of the artist's exploration of the bodily and humane through his signature medium of 3D-printed ceramic.
In light of recent events in the highest echelons of the creative industries, Trauma Queen might serve as a bridge between times and a totem for what has gone unchanged.
Antoine Renard, born in 1984 in Paris, lives and works between Paris and Lourdes, France. Recent solo exhibition includes Atelier Vortex, Dijon, France, and Fondation MRO, Arles, France (both 2023), Cité des Sciences, Paris, France (2022), Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain, Sète, France, and Saint-Denis, France (both 2021), Very, Berlin, Germany (2019), Komplot, Brussels, Belgium (2018), and Marsèlleria, Milan, Italy (2017). Renard has also featured in group shows such as Fondation Villa Datris, Paris, France, Le Saint André, Monaco, and Artocène, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France (all 2023), Musée International de la Parfumerie, Grasse, France, and Fondation Villa Datris, L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France (both 2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, and Artemis Fontana, Paris, France (both 2019), Picnic, Basel, Switzerland (2018), and Berlin Biennale 9, Germany (2016).
Antoine Renard is the winner of numerous awards and residencies including Inkubator Innovator fellowship (Germany 2015), Goethe Institut Residency Prague (Czech Republic, 2017), Residence Cheval Noir (with Komplot), Brussels (Belgium, 2018), Occitanie de la villa Médicis prize (2019).
-
Focus: Clarissa Tossin »A Queda do Céu / The Falling Sky«
Clarissa Tossin, A Queda do Céu / The Falling Sky, 2019, archival inkjet print on photo paper with lamination, wood, rotating motors, three elements: 58 cm, 84 cm, 97 cm diameter. Overall dimensions variable
For the last fifteen years, Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based Clarissa Tossin (b.1973) has engaged with both built and natural environments of extractive economies using installation, video, sculpture, and weavings; studying how cultural differences resist, or are transformed, through exchanges at a local and global level. Her latest body of work engages with the private sector involvement in the 21st Century space exploration, as unprecedented pressure on our planet’s resources has turned the extractivist gaze beyond the Earth.
The Falling Sky has been previously exhibited at Falling from Earth, solo show, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Denver, Colorado, USA, 2022; Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion, solo show, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France, 2021, and Dhaka Art Summit: Seismic Movements, Bangladesh. Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation, 2020.
Tossin’s work is present in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; MFA Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Seattle Art Museum; MSU Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan University; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; USA; Casa Niemeyer, Universidade de Brasília; and Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; as well as numerous private collections in Brazil, the Americas, Europe and Asia.
This year’s Whitney Biennial, which just opened to the public, features a new installation by Clarissa Tossin.
-
Focus: Özgür Kar »Death's Right Hand«
Özgür Kar, Death's Right Hand, 2022, 2-channel 4K video with sound, 5 mins loop, two 75” TVs, media players, TV mount, cables, 335 x 95 x 70 cm
Özgür Kar’s video works are deadpan existential vignettes – micro-dramas in which nothing really happens. Like a scene by Beckett reduced to its bare bones, they involve a lot of waiting; they are a lot like Limbo. The screens themselves are vessels for the protagonists they display and contain – their edges draw the cramped extremity of each character’s world. The protagonists are skeletons. Sometimes, they’re accompanied by a twittering bird, sometimes they blow into a flute or sigh. Stoic and mirthful, they ruminate on the circumstances of their existence, turning their tomb-screens into stages for modest tragedies. Since the dawn of time, nothing has really changed in human nature: Bugs Bunny is trapped in Dante’s Inferno.
This week both the 8th Yokohama Triennale, Japan, and the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, open with presentations of Kar’s work.
Özgür Kar (b. 1992, Ankara, Turkey) lives and works in Amsterdam. He is a graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Recent solo presentations include DUSK, Fridericianum, Kassel, DE, Intermissions, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL, US (2023). At the end of the day, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL (2022); STORAGE DRAMA, Emalin, UK (2021); MACABRE, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR (2021); Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna, AT (2021); A Decade of Submission, Édouard Montassut, Paris, FR (2020) and A New Start, UKS, Oslo, NO (2019). Kar’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, FR (2022); Jeu de Paume, Paris, FR (2022); K.U.K. Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, Trondheim, NO (2021); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2021); CAC Brétigny, FR (2020); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, NL (2020); Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, NL (2018); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL (2017).
-
Focus: Lap-See Lam »Tales of the Altersea (Dahlia)«
Lap-See Lam, Tales of the Altersea (Dahlia), 2023, neon with green glass, 132.3 x 26 x 16.5 cm
At Galerie Nordenhake focus Lap-See Lam presents a character from an earlier chapter in her ongoing expansive narrative. Tales of the Altersea (Dahlia) was first presented in the exhibition Tales of the Altersea at Portikus, Frankfurt. The core of the exhibition was an eponymous ten-channel video projection that submerged viewers in a shadow play and was later presented at the Swiss Institute, New York.
Tales of the Altersea, as told by the artist, centres around the Sea Palace, a dragon-shaped, three-story floating restaurant that sailed from Shanghai to Europe in the early 1990s. Now retired, the ship served as a haunted house at Stockholm's Gröna Lund amusement park until recently.
Dahlia (2023), the ghostly green neon figure floating below the ceiling at focus bears the name of one of the protagonists in Lam’s tale. The story follows Dahlia and her twin sister Julie across a journey of adventure and discovery as they swim toward the wreck of the Sea Palace and encounter a series of characters born out of Cantonese history and mythology.
For the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the upcoming 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (20 April - 24 November 2024) Lap-See Lam has been invited by Moderna Museet to create an ambitious multi-modal installation - The Altersea Opera. In collaboration with Asrin Haidari, curator of Swedish and Nordic Art at the museum, Lam has extended the invitation to artist Kholod Hawash (Finland) and composer Tze Yeung Ho (Norway), and an international ensemble of collaborators ranging from singers, costume designers and filmmakers to interpreters and a certified bamboo scaffold engineer.
Recent solo exhibitions include Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo NY; the Swiss Institute, New York City; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (all 2023); Bonniers Konsthall (2022); Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2021); Moderna Museet Malmö (2018–2019); and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2022, 2018). Tales of the Altersea was exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki as part of the Ars Fennica 2023 exhibition. She has taken part in group exhibitions at venues including Ghost 2565, Bangkok (2022); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); PinchukArtCentre (2021); Performa 19 in New York (2019); Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris (2019); Luleå Biennial (2018); Kópavogur Art Museum, Kópavogur (2018); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017). Lam was the winner of Dagens Nyheter Culture Prize in 2021 and a recipient of the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant in 2017. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize. She was nominated for the Ars Fennica Award 2023.
-
Focus: Ione Saldanha »Untitled (Plank)«
Ione Saldanha, Untitled (Plank), 1989. Oil on wood, 56 x 24 x 1 cm
During the last decade of her life, Ione Saldanha produced her Tábuas (Planks), a series that she considered an extension of her previous Ripas (Slats) and Bambus (Bamboos). If in her abstract paintings of the fifties Saldanha achieved a synthesis of popular and urbanist elements, it is in the spatial jump of her Planks, Slats and Bamboos that the deconstructed urban landscape achieves physicality.
Although very active while living, with over ten participations in the São Paulo Biennial — in addition to numerous exhibitions across Brazil, Colombia, Italy and Portugal —Saldanha’s fundamental role within twentieth century Brazilian art is yet to be duly recognized.
Ione Saldanha is participating posthumously in the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who in 2021 put together the largest retrospective exhibition dedicated to her work at the Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).
IONE SALDANHA
b. Alegrete, 1919, d. Rio de Janeiro, 2021A painter and sculptor born in south of Brazil, Saldanha participated in more than ten editions of the São Paulo Biennial, three editions of the Panorama de Arte Atual Brasileira at MAM-SP – São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (1969, 1970 and 1975); 10ª Quadriennale di Roma (1977); 2ª Bienal de Arte Coltejer, Medellín, Colombia (1970); Brasil/60 anos de Arte Moderna, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (1982); Forma/Suporte, MAC – Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (2003), and Genealogias do Contemporâneo, MAM – Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (2010).
Among her numerous solo shows, the following stand out: Bobinas, MAM - Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (1971); Ione Saldanha, Brazilian Institute of Architects, Rio de Janeiro (1981); Ione Saldanha, Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro (1996); Ione Saldanha: The Time and the Color, MAM – Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, MON – Museum Oscar Niemeyer – Curitiba, Brazil, Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2012), and Ione Saldanha: The Invented City, MASP – Museum of Art of São Paulo (2021).
-
Focus: Ralph Müller »IST NOCH WAS«
Ralph Müller, IST NOCH WAS, 2023, oil on canvas, 130 x 98 cm
In a long process of an intuitive image finding, Müller reacts on everyday objects in his environment. Here he moves in his wide reference system of painting history, that ranges from early human drawings on rock walls to Renaissance portrait paintings, to the painting of the 20th Century.
IST NOCH WAS stems from the idea of a portrait, with reflections on modern technical methods of imaging procedures such as the MRI in medicine.
Ralph Müller was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1968. He lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include CRAMA Show Space Berlin, Germany (2022), Albrecht Kastein Urologisches Zentrum Berlin-Steglitz, Germany (2019), Galerie Horst Schuler Düsseldorf, Germany (2012), and Galerie Tatjana Pieters Ghent, Germany (2011). Galerie Tatjana Pieters Ghent also presented his work at ARCO Madrid (2011). Further group exhibitions include Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany (2010), Galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala, Milan, Italy (2009), and Cabinet des Dessins, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France (2003).
-
Focus: Johan Thurfjell »Liminal«
Liminal, 2023, wooden frame, curtain, kinetic machinery, shoes, 270 x 160 x 100 cm
Johan Thurfjell’s work combines everyday observations with myths and mysticism with which he builds up his own distinctive poetic symbolism. Regardless of his choice of material or technique Thurfjell’s sculptures, paintings, video works and installations show a visible enjoyment and dexterity in his handcraft.
In Liminal shoes shift restlessly behind a curtain, conveying a vaguely comic, mildly threatening presence between this room and another.
The narrative that permeates Thurfjell’s new works touches on the universal appeal of that we cannot see, that we cannot touch. The most existential musings, such as those about life and death, are manifested in different cultures and eras in various forms as myths, rituals and symbols. These ruminations could be seen as an attempt to reach from our reality to a possible other, that which can be jointly described as the afterlife.
Johan Thurfjell was born in 1970 in Solna. He currently lives and works in Tullgarn, Sweden. In collaboration with this year’s Market Art Fair the artist is participating in the group exhibition Splendid Silent Sun in Vällingby Centrum. This summer Thurfjell will exhibit at PAX, St:a Annas kapell, Trosa lands kyrka. Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen (2020), Konstnärshuset, Stockholm (2019), Judiska Museet c/o Tyska kyrkan, Stockholm (2017), Uppsala Konstmuseum and Eskilstuna Konstmuseum (2011), Magasin III Stockholm Konsthall (2007), Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2004) and Index in Stockholm (2001). Recent group exhibitions include the 14th Small Sculpture Triennial, Fellbach (2019), Borås International Sculpture Biennale, Borås (2018), Traces of Existence, Jewish Museum c/o German Church, Stockholm (2017), If you tell me a story you add more, Galerie der Künstler, München and Espace Mira, Porto (2016, 2015), Suecia Contemporare, Uppsala Konstmuseum (2015), OSL Contemporary, Oslo (2013) and Thrice upon a time, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2010).
-
Focus: Sophie Reinhold »DOTD«
DOTD, 2021, oil on marble powder on jute, 180 x 150 cm
Sophie Reinhold’s imagery draws upon classical iconography and mythology, which is emphasised by the sculptural quality of the paintings, achieved by applying layers of marble or graphite powder – at times dyed with pigments - onto layers of stretched jute.
The result is sanded down to a fetishist smoothness, parts of which are carved to create figurative reliefs. Bare textile revealed in the process irritates the seductive illusion of perfection. The appearance of an image and what stands behind it, is a recurring question in the artists’ practice. Her technique, aided by her painting skills, and a twisted sense of humour, open room for discourse.
Sophie Reinhold currently lives and works in Berlin, where she was born in 1981. Recently she has had solo exhibitions at Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, Philipp Zollinger, Zurich (both 2022), Galerie Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna (2021), Sundogs, Paris as well as Kunstverein Reutlingen with Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (both 2019). Reinhold‘s works have been on view in group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Graz and Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg (both 2022), Neue Gesellschaft bildende Kunst, Berlin (2021), Kunstverein Ingolstadt and n.b.k., Berlin (both 2019). She is the recipient of the Villa Romana Prize (2012) and was shortlisted for the Max-Pechstein-Prize 2013, as well as the Columbus Art Foundation-Prize of Kunsthalle Ravensburg (2012).
-
Focus: Olof Marsja »The Dancer«
The Dancer, 2023, jesmonite, poly wool fabric, vinyl paint, bronze, brass, reindeer leather, stainless steel, poly silk cord, 290 x 280 x 100 cm
-
Focus: Torsten Andersson »Tygskulptur«
Tygskulptur, 2001-2002, oil on canvas, 205 x 180 cm
-
Focus: Alina Chaiderov »Impact«
Impact, 2023, copper, hay net, Wilson Impact volley ball, 180 x 111 x 51 cm (copper cage) (Courtesy the Artist and Ciaccia Levi, Paris-Milan)
In Impact, a copper cage frames a volleyball enclosed in a bright red hay net hanging from the ceiling. The parallel lines and the polished surface of the metal structure contrast with the pregnant body of the sack, whose suspension emphasises the verticality of the space, using movement and immobility as primary counterpoints.
Chaiderov often returns to materials that bare ambiguous significance. Here the prominent element indicates athletics and physicality, while simultaneously alluding to a psychological story of protection and boundaries.
Alina Chaiderov (Leningrad, Russia, 1984) lives and works in Gothenburg and Stockholm, Sweden.
She received a BA of Fine Arts at Valand Academy, Gothenburg in 2015. Later this year she has an upcoming solo exhibition at Aranya Art Centre, China. Recent solo exhibitions include Ark, Ciaccia Levi, Milano (2023), Mending a broken world, Sörmlands Museum (2018) and A New Memory is Made, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivolo - Turin (2016). She has also participated in various group exhibitions including Eclettica!, Museo Ettore Fico, Turin (2022), Udden skulptur, Hunnebostrand (2022), Nouvel accrochage de la collection, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Sant-Étienne Métropole (2021), Recyclage/Surcyclage, Foundation Villa Datris, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (2020), Fragmented Realities, Göteborgs Konsthall (2019) and Snittet, Borås Konstmuseum (2018). In 2015 she received the illy Present Future Prize. -
Focus: Stanley Whitney »Untitled, 2016«
Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2016, monotype in watercolor on Lanaquarelle paper, 121.9 x 182.9 cm
Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1946 and lives and works in New York and Solignano, Italy. His works have been featured in exhibitions since the early seventies. In 2015 the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, presented his major solo exhibition ”Dance the Orange.” In 2016 he had a solo exhibition at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. Whitney participated in documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017) and in “Utopia Station” at the 50th Venice Biennial (2003).
He has been included in group exhibitions at, among others, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice (2022), Moderna Museet, Malmö (2019); Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2018); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2016); Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, and Contemporary Art Museum Houston (both 2014); Belvedere, Vienna (2012); The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (2008); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2007); Art in General, New York (1998); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (1991); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1981); and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (1976). He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996) and Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2002) and won the first Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize in Painting (2011) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010).
A comprehensive survey exhibition of his work is planned for 2023 at the Albright-Knox’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, NY.
-
Focus: Olle Bærtling »KSARD«
KSARD, 1980, oil on canvas, 195 x 97 cm
The year before Bærtling passed away in 1981, he completed KSARD - the last and, as Bærtling in his inimitable way said, “most radical painting. Absolutely unsellable." Nevertheless, the painting was sold to Bærtling's longtime friend and collector, the soccer player Nisse Liedholm, who often visited Bærtling when he stayed in Stockholm. About ten years later, I managed to acquire the painting, which has since been in the gallery's possession.
The painting has unusually open angles, the colour is Bærtling White and the then-newly developed "Quinacridone", a red-violet shade which Bærtling perceived as pure energy.
- Claes Nordenhake
Olle Bærtling was born in Halmstad, Sweden. He spent the majority of his career in Stockholm, where he died in 1981.
Since the 1950s, Bærtling's work has been presented in many solo and group exhibitions, both in Sweden and internationally. In 1954, he represented Sweden at the Venice Biennial. He was honoured with several important prizes, including the award of the 7th Biennial of São Paulo in 1963. In 1981, Malmö Konsthall and Stockholm's Moderna Museet compiled the first comprehensive survey exhibition of Bærtling's work. In 2007 Moderna Museet Stockholm and National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo presented a new survey exhibition of Bærtling that was also on view at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, founded by Donald Judd in 2008.
-
Focus: Frida Orupabo »Turning«
Turning, 2021, wallpaper, dimensions variable
In recent years, Orupabo's collages have expanded to sculptures, photographic prints of digital montages and here a wall paper of a woman opening a curtain while peering back titled Turning (2021).
Frida Orupabo was born 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, and lives and works in Oslo. Solo exhibitions include Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022); Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim (2021); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both 2019). Orupabo participated in the 58th Venice Biennale exhibition (2018) as well as the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021). Together with Ming Smith and Missylanyus, Frida Orupabo presented her work in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition "A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions" at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague (both 2019), Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2018), and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017).
Frida Orupabo’s first monograph was published by Sternberg Press on the occasion of her exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim 2021. The book contains extensive documentation of her work and essays by Stefanie Hessler, Lola Olufemi, and Legacy Russell.
Her work is included in the collections of Tate, UK, Guggenheim Museum, USA, Studio Museum in Harlem, USA, Kadist Foundation, France / USA, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Museum Ludwig, Germany, Jumex Museum, Mexico, Kistefors Collection, Norway, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Moderna Museet, Sweden, Mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria, Nasjonalmuseet, Norway, Foundation ARCO, Spain, Perez Art Museum, USA, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden, KIAMSA, Finland, Verbund Collection, Austria, 21C Hotel Museum, USA, A4 Arts Foundation, South Africa, Alexander Tutsek-Foundation, Germany, Dean Collection, USA, Museum Rietberg, Switzerland, Scheryn Collection, South Africa, Turku Art Museum, Finland, Zabludowicz Collection, UK / Finland, Marieuse Hessel Collection, USA.
-
Focus: Tore Wallert »225 003«
225 003, 2022, tempera, acrylic and oil paint on canvas, walnut frame, 126 x 205 cm
Wallert's work explores poetic and spatial topics relevant to our time and sociopolitical climate. His work consists of expansive fictional worlds using a wide range of antithetical materials and suggestive imagery. In Wallert's recent paintings, there is a constant alternation between the narrative and the formal, the figurative and the abstract.
Tore Wallert, born 1985 in Stockholm, currently lives and works in Berlin. Solo presentation exhibition venues include CND, Paris, Leopold Museum, Vienna, Tanzhaus, Zürich, Jo Brand, Glasgow, Bad Reputation Fine Arts, Los Angeles, The Loon, Toronto, Erik Nordenhake, Stockholm and James Fuentes' *Allen and Eldridge, New York City. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, Mother Culture, Los Angeles/Berlin, Brücke Museum, Berlin, Sang Hipolyt, Berlin and Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City.
-
Focus: Ayan Farah »RA - Hammar«
RA - Hammar, 2016, indigo, linen, 200 x 120 cm
The construction of her fabrics is dictated by available material and often includes off-cuts from earlier works, accumulatively stitched together into patchworks that contain the stories of their making. Farah’s practice is self-sufficient in that her works are generated from pre-sourced materials, home-grown pigments and fundamental environmental factors such as sunlight rather than automated processes or global supply chains.
The work RA - Hammar (2016) has previously been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and is made through a process of exposing the folded, dyed textile to sunlight for two periods, thereby creating an almost-photographic image of the creases that were present when it was exposed.
Ayan Farah was born in 1978 in Sharjah, UAE, to Somali parents. She grew up in Sweden but moved to the UK to study painting at the Royal College of Art in London. She returned to Stockholm in 2020. International exhibition venues include the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Tarble Arts Centre in Charleston, the Klein Collection in Germany, and Galeria Casas Riegner in Bogotá. Her work is included in the collections of The Kadist Foundation, the Roberts Family Foundation, Public Art Agency Sweden, and Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, among others. Ayan Farah will participate in the Black Rock Senegal 2022 Artist-in-Residence program, found-ed by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley.
-
Focus: Ann Edholm »Nacht-und-Nacht I«
Nacht-und-Nacht I, 2020, acrylic, oil and beeswax on canvas, 260 x 175 cm
-
Focus: Emanuel Röhss »Times Past and Future | Earth Song«
Times Past and Future, 2021, fiberglass and steel, 373 x 40.5 x 40.5 cm per column
Earth Song, 2021, digital audio (24 bit stereo mp3) with programmed light sequence through Max MSP and two Cameo Matrix LED panels, 56 minutes 9 secondsSince the 1930s they have been utilized frequently as locations or design references in a large number of movie and TV productions, e.g. Blade Runner (1982) and Game of Thrones (2011-2019). Through the mediums of sculpture, installation, video, light, and sound, Röhss explores how these films, television series and buildings exercise a reciprocal influence on each other. Central concerns in the artist’s work are how reality shapes fiction and vice versa, and we perceive and experience time. What psychological affect is engendered in the encounters between fiction, place, and its history?
In Times Past and Future Röhss has identified specific set design details, ornate features, within the Tyrell building film set in the 1982 film Blade Runner, as well as the Temple of the Graces in the Game of Thrones universe. These fictitious architectures have proven to be based on Wright’s textile blocks, albeit metamorphosed into forms thought to characterize the imagined pasts and futures that the narratives are set in. The artist employs these block like forms that through the same molding process used in the production of film sets that have been fashioned into columns much like those in Wright’s original buildings.
The light illuminating the sculptures is fluctuation in intensity which is determined by an audio sequence available here. This sound and light piece titled Earth Song is based on recordings of seismic activity above magnitude 5 in California’s since the 1980s. The work aims to make a fragment of geological time somewhat tangible and serve as a reminder of Earth’s constant mutability. In the process of making this piece Röhss translated the given earthquake events into audible sound and perceivable light, in an attempt to address the passing of time and perpetual decline of nature, matter, and the Earth.
Emanuel Röhss (*1985 Gothenburg) lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London, where he received an MA in Painting, as well as at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, earning a BA in Painting. Röhss recently received the Sten A Ohlsson Foundation for Research and Culture 2021 visual art award, on the occasion of which he staged an exhibition at the Gothenburg Museum of Art — his most extensive solo presentation to date. The artist has been subject of solo shows at Issues Gallery Stockholm, Thomas Duncan Gallery; Los Angeles, Coma Gallery; Sidney, SALTS; Basel, Carl Kostyál; Stockholm, T293 Gallery; Rome, Index Art Foundation; Stockholm and Project Native Informant; London as well as recognized international awards. He was included in group exhibitions at Sadie Coles HQ; London, the Thiel Museum; Stockholm, Anonymous Gallery; New York, Sven Harry’s Konstmuseum; Stockholm, Museo Capadimonte, Napels, Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö, South London Gallery, Seventeen Gallery, as well as Rowing; London.
-
Focus: Ryan Mrozowski »Untitled (Field)«
Untitled (Field), 2021, acrylic on linen, 152.4 x 101.6 cm
His approach is witty, closely linked to linguistics and word games like tongue-twisters, palindromes and spoonerisms. Like a painterly George Perec he uses classification and play within the set constrains of his motif series. Working with binary oppositions like background and foreground, flatness and depth, presence and absence, the flat plane of the linen becomes a stage for his taxonomy of forms.
Ryan Mrozowski was born in Indiana, PA, in 1981 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005, and his BFA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Mrozowski has held exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York (2019), Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2017), Arcade Gallery, London (2016), On Stellar Rays, New York (2015), Art in General, Vilnius (2014), Pierogi, Brooklyn (2012, 2010) and the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles (2008). His works have been included in group exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2018), Pratt Institute, New York (2017), Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2016), Salon 94, New York, and Marianne Boesky, New York (both 2015), Chapter, New York (2014), and The Kitchen, New York (2011). Mrozowski also had a solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin in 2018 and at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm in 2020.
-
Focus: Sarah Crowner »Untitled«
Untitled, 2021, acrylic on canvas, sewn, 165 x 122 cm
-
Focus: Spencer Finch »Study for Goldberg Variations 21, 30, 29«
Study for Goldberg Variations 21, 30, 29, 2021, 6 fluorescent lights, fixtures, filter, 122 x 43.2 x 5 cm overall
-
Focus: Dan Holdsworth »Blackout 17«
Dan Holdsworth, Blackout 17, 2010, c-print, 177 x 226 cm
-
Focus: Emma Bernhard »Failed Geometry«
Failed Geometry, 2019, acrylic on wool, 260 x 65 cm
-
Focus: Christian Andersson »Angel of the Hearth«
Angel of the Hearth, 2011, plaster, metal, 70 x 100 x 100 cm, edition of 3
-
Focus: Gerard Byrne »Beasts«
Gerard Byrne, Beasts, 2018, analogue silver gelatin prints
-
Focus: Håkan Rehnberg »Untitled«
Untitled, 2018, oil on acrylic, 200 x 185 cm
-
Focus: Elena Damiani »Fading Field N14«
Fading Field N14, 2020, digital print on silk chiffon, wood structure, black matte paint on wall, 190 x 132.7 x 40 cm
-
Focus: Jonas Dahlberg »Music Box, 2015«
Music Box, 2015, framed black and white photograph on cotton paper, framed: 218.5 x 143 x 6 cm
-
Focus: Frida Orupabo »Untitled«
Untitled, fine art print on cotton paper, 4 photographs, framed each 102 x 73,5 cm, overall dimensions: 225 x 170 cm, edition of 5 + 1 AP
-
Focus: Gunilla Klingberg »When stillness culminates, there is movement, 2016 & SUN PRINT, storefront window at Jungian Chulhakwon, Gwanju, South Korea, 2016 06 05. 10.29-11.14.«
When stillness culminates, there is movement, 2016, bamboo bead blinds, dimensions variable
SUN PRINT, storefront window at Jungian Chulhakwon, Gwanju, South Korea, 2016 06 05. 10.29-11.14., 2016, cyanotype, 215 x 165 cm, framed: 223 x 174 cm
-
Focus: Håkan Rehnberg »Untitled«
Untitled, 2019, oil on acrylic, 200 x 185 cm
-
Focus: Johan Thurfjell »The Wanderer«
Johan Thurfjell, The Wanderer, 2019, papier-mâché, iron, 165 x 90 x 80 cm
-
Focus: Jimmie Durham »Four Stone Slabs Supporting Each Other (Black & White)«
Four Stone Slabs Supporting Each Other (Black & White), 1997, perstorp laminate, wood, glass, steel wire, felt, 2 pieces 214 x 63 x 63 cm each
-
Focus: Michel Majerus »Untitled«
Untitled, 1996 – 1997, acrylic on canvas, 3 parts – 60 x 60 cm each
-
Focus: Ann Edholm »Lichtzwang«
Lichtzwang, 2018, oil on canvas, 215 x 180 cm
-
Focus: Sofia Hultén »Statik Elastik«
Statik Elastik, 2011 –, 3 columns of car jacks, variable dimensions
-
Focus: Esko Männikkö »Untitled (from Harmony Sisters)«
Untitled (from Harmony Sisters), 2005, pigment print, framed by the artist, 91.5 x 120.5 cm
-
Focus: Stanley Whitney »Stay Song 24«
Stay Song 24, 2018, oil on canvas, 102 x 102 cm
-
Focus: Ann Edholm »Trotz/Kyssen«
Trotz/Kyssen, 2014, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm
-
Focus: Marina Adams »The Secret of Greek Grammar«
The Secret of Greek Grammar, 2017, acrylic on linen, 173 x 147 cm