Looking for art to grace the walls of your castle? Or as a special gift for your love ones or best of friends?
Besides heading for the Affordable Art Fair Stockholm at Augustendalstorget 6, 131 52 Nacka Strand from 11 to 14 October, why not make additional beelines to Your Living City’s picks of art exhibitions for October?
This selection promises something for everyone – from western abstracts to Japanese inspired designs… from the purely aesthetical to the hyper political… from the time-honoured to the avant garde… from serene natural to techno man made… from realism to surrealism and beyond…
To seduce to own… or inspire to desire and aspire!
Exhibition: Another Movement
Artist: Thomas Elovsson
Where: Björkholmen GALLERY, Rödbodtorget 2
When: Till 29 September
About abstraction as a sign of hope for the modern; particularly geometric abstraction as an artistic Esperanto – a language capable of moving over large areas and cultural differences; Thomas Elovsson’s abstraction is a kind of “art for all” that rejects technical expertise; offering a touch of comedy, of fascination and of confidence in circles and rectangles.
This naivety and optimism of something global and forward-looking derives from Elovsson’s interested in Lennart Rodhe’s monumental work – package in the long lines; created for the post office in Östersund in 1952; where Rodhe’s triangles and circles were far beyond the decorative; making public art something to take seriously.
Exhibition: Coincidences
Artist: Mats Svensson
Where: Kaolin, Hornsgatan 50
When: Till 3 October
Mats Svensson is heavily influenced by Japanese design language and its relation to nature and asymmetry; often returning to simple irregular bowls for different purposes to seek some sort of balance between the kontrollade and contingencies that allow surprising coincidences coming into play and affecting the final result.
Working with used goods frees him to abuse his pottery; throwing printing forms in plaster; with glazes composed mostly of clay, ash and feldspar. Everything is burned in oxygen-poor atmosphere electric and wood ovens to about 1280 degrees.
Exhibition: Body/Index
Artist: Carmen Winant
Where: Stene Projects Gallery
Brunnsgatan 21b
When: Till 6 October
With found images as her medium, Carmen Winant‘s medium practice exists in the intersection of photography, installation, and collage.
Body/Index is a single piece that is modular, and can be broken apart into many discrete sections. Drawing from Winant’s vast image collection, it is an arrangement of pictures across category and type, moving beyond being held by a particular theme of one kind of picture or action.
Instead colliding images of women reflect, but do not describe, one another. Their only patently consistent variable is in backgrounds derived from a single source: a series of books of women posing for the camera; their bodies, photographic references for artists.
As with all of Winant’s projects, Body/Index is a decidedly feminist inquest. It explores the way in which women are looked at and look at themselves, and of how we live inside of external bodies that can bruise and heal. All distinct experiences shared as a treatise of the act of collecting, and of the power of aggregating images.
Exhibition: Human Age / The Age of Humans
Artists: Katja Pettersson, Catrin Andersson, Isak Anshelm & Magnus Thierfelder
Where: Elastic Gallery / Ola Gustafsson, Ulrikagatan 15
When: Till 6 October
In The Age of Humans, Katja Pettersson, Catrin Andersson, Isak Anshelm and Magnus Thierfelder relate to nature and humanity’s possibilities, weaknesses, and abilities to adapt to his or her surroundings.
Pettersson’s New Nature creates worlds in blown glass spheres – places where technology and nature meet. Within are solar panels and fans – a man-made nature of accessible roads, and natural resources such as sand for building and glass facades; where cultivated land has become expensive and increasingly sought-after commodities.
Andersson’s work consists of coal, sand, paper and iron: all raw materials from the industrialization that created the concept of the Anthropocene Era – the Human Age. Our development is reflected in the pursuit of materials such as wood from the forests, coal mining, iron and sand from the bottom of the sea for various constructions all in favor of rapid social development around the world.
Anshelm’s subject is the ocean. A Sea of Regret binds water together as an organism that encompasses our whole planet. The small format sharpens our eyes to what is a huge body of water.
Thierfelder’s Untitled (bee) affects both mind and being. A dead bee caught in a drinking glass under a thin broken iPhone glass. Is it in our age that we will eradicate this species?
Thierfelder’s video All This and Nothing exposes the fragility between nature and human constructions, a reflection of the sun fleetingly caught in an extended hand.
Exhibition: Bear Fields Mountains
Artist: Björn Engberg
Where: CFF – Center for Photography, Tjärhovsgatan 44
When: Till 7 October
Engberg’s Bear Fields Mountains is a video in which someone goes between cars of a freight train. The sound is metallic and hard. The landscape discerned in seconds is the untouched Scandinavian wilderness.
As we become part of the performance, our wanderings in the gallery space becomes no different from having no pictures on the wall in search of Engberg’s animistic utopia – a belief in naturbesjälning.
Exhibition & Artist: Mattias Fagerholm
Where: GRAFISKA SÄLLSKAPET, Hornsgatan 6
When: Till 10 October
Grafiska Sällskapet is an association of active artists from all over Sweden with an interest in graphics. Expressing themselves using art graphical methods in graphical magazines, they test and stretch boundaries with different modes of expression.
In this exhibition, we get acquainted with Mattias Fagerholm‘s graphic expressions; extending what we have become acquainted through what he had previously exhibited at the National Gallery in Stockholm and at the Academy Fagerholm.
Proof that Swedish graphic traditions continues into the 21st century.
Exhibition & Artist: HANS JÖRGEN JOHANSEN
Where: ANNAELLEGALLERY, Karlavägen 15 B
When: 28 September to 28 October
Hans Jörgen Johansen’s deserted, beautiful work depicts an infinite sphere where systematically arranged models grow into evocative landscapes imbued with humor and seriousness. His conceptual landscapes, often perceived as realistic without directly referencing any existing places, appear to be in continuous transformation on both micro and macroscopic levels.
Johansen’s new series of works focusing on how textile patterns and masonry have developed into new forms; along with photographs, wall objects and sculptures.
Johansen’s photographs devise images based on textile patterns commonly found in woven fabrics; such as Glencheck and Tartan. Instead of using warp-and-weft, he forms works with materials from the construction industry. Some of the models are documented with a perspective from above – like a satellite viewing vast geometric patterns in fields, while others resemble while others resemble landscapes with endless horizons.
His modeled wall objects address the influence of masonry during industrialization. With red bricks in miniature, he has carefully and precisely recreated the four recurring textile patterns of Glencheck.
Alongside the wall sits sculptures of stacked model masonry bricks and miniature pallets. Each forming infinite formations and patterns depending on our perspectives to explore the concept of infinity with both the repetitive patterns in the works themselves as well as the repetitive performance of creating them.
Exhibition: life Stripes
Artist: Eva Olofsson
Where: Galleri Eklund,
Karlavagen 15
When: 29 September to 20 October
Olofsson’s mediated idyll in painting the richness of hues and lush vegetation is her role as florist champion who through themes of freedom yield motifs of exotic poultry with the ability to fly away and of wild animals roaming free in landscape paintings without a too substantial presence of man.
However, there is an inherent darkness in this idyllic setting. Steps to Ranking, Raise Your Glance, How Long, Hopefully, You Are Not Alone and Stop It reveal man’s problematic relationship to the environment and also calls to action the safeguarding of wildlife and nature.
Following three exhibits:
Where: Galerie Forsblom, Karlavägen 9
When: 28 September to 28 October
Exhibition (A): Heartlands
Artist: Reima Nevalainen
One of Finland’s most interesting contemporary young artists, Nevalainen’s paintings are concurrently abstract and figurative. Humans are portrayed with contorted and twisted bodies, with features evolved into amorphous forms; disintegrating familiar positions, functions, as well as identity.
By utilizing paper collage she creates different layers upon which acrylic color is applied, sometimes mixed with sand. The colors derive from the material are equally important. Soft and muted, they become as bare as skin, bone, wood or earth. Flora and fauna, elements and patterns from nature – such as lines, waves, dots and naked spaces – recur. The different textures give a tactile feeling to the surface and underneath, peeling off layer by layer, is a glimpse of the subconscious, the essence of things and an intrinsic order.
Exhibition (B): Witness Marks
Artist: Lotta Hannerz
In Hannerz’s work, the tendrils of introspection coil around uninterrupted attention to the surrounding world. In this reality, the factual and the fictitious have entered a form of symbiosis.
With a gently nostalgic tone, where witness and agent constantly change positions and incessantly move their marks, a place is conjured where the solid appears to be ethereal. Reviewing, mapping and cataloging. Systematization and dissection.
Hannerz’s art resists the limitations we are ascribed. It questions our intuitive experience of a world characterized by physical stability. As the works of Witness Marks interact, a space is created where even simultaneous events seem entirely possible.
Exhibition (C): Rising Fever
Artist: Ines Sederholm
Belonging to a younger generation of artists with a background in street art, Sederholm has become established with a characteristic style of the illustrative with bright colors and bold graphic patterns.
Her starting point is humankind’s relationship with the oceans. She illuminates the environmental problems we currently face due to human impact: the warming and acidification of the oceans, coral reef bleaching, plastic pollution and the consequences of deep-sea oil drilling. Her work also comments on the eradication of marine species, food chains and entire ecosystems.
Photo and information credits: The respective galleries
