About the exhibition

The time it takes to complete a cyclical movement can be called rotation period. The meaning and use of the word varies widely, from astronomical definitions of the time it takes for a celestial body to complete an orbit, to descriptions of the rhythms of nature and human life. In nature, we see such rotations in the changes of season, the cycles of water and the migration of animals. Human beings have inner cycles, such as our diurnal rhythms, sleep patterns and the different phases of life, and in society we have cultural traditions, economic fluctuations and terms of office. Sports also have rotation periods in the recurring patterns of training and competitions – periods of building, achievement and recuperation. The word is simply a reminder that a great deal in life is cyclical – that what we do, experience, are influenced by and surround ourselves with often returns, albeit sometimes in a new form.

Kristina Bength’s watercolours are like slow, painterly interpretations of photographic archive images documenting a brief moment. The words in their titles are from specific descriptions of phenomena or structures in nature, and these words also provide support during the actual work process. Through the artist’s hand and eyes, the photographs are developed anew, allowing nature and culture to merge poetically in word and image. Natural elements, often with supporting, separating or naturally correcting effects, are woven into architectonic pictures, both interiors and exteriors, and nature’s architecture is reflected in landscape views. Spiral Grain / Rotation Period featured in the exhibition shows the fine, arched wooden ceiling with visible roof beams of a tennis hall somewhere in Sweden. Spiral grain refers to wood fibres that grow in a slight coil around the core of the tree, rather than vertically. This growth pattern makes the wood harder, and every kind of tree has its own spiral-shaped structure. A tennis ball sliced over the net is as fast as the wood is slow growing its fibres around the tree core. The second part of the title, rotation period, was mentioned in the introduction but refers specifically here to forestry, where it means the time between planting and felling a generation of trees. Her paintings consistently portray the kinship between man, nature and culture over time.

Ever since the 1960s, Lena Cronqvist has used her personal experiences of life’s many phases, not least the difficult ones, to create works of a highly universal significance.

Travel has been an important part of her life, both around the world and along the craggy Bohuslän coast, which she has depicted for many years. Young girls also feature often in her paintings and sculptures. They first appeared as far back as in the 1970s and 1980s, but were of a more serious demeanour, and on her sojourns in New York in the 1990s, they assumed a more lively and playful part in both paintings and bronze sculptures. The Foundation has two works with girls skipping with a rope, a painting with three girls against a multicoloured, checkered background, inspired by the New York street grid, and now also the delicate bronze Three Girls Skipping. Play is a way for children to explore the world and challenge boundaries, in a domain between fantasy and reality into which Lena Cronqvist has invited us throughout her long artistic practice.

Kristina Eriksson has focused mainly on painting since the 1970s, but also makes sketches, drawings and, more recently, clay sculptures. Her works takes time to create, and the existential and poetic images all seem to have struggled their way into existence by means of some inner compulsion. Certain motifs are repeated, but every painting is individual. Their content, which can be gloomy yet embrace a gentle dry humour, is processed and reduced and given the time it needs. These unassuming pictures, a form of distilled life, are often accompanied by a few seemingly hastily scribbled words or sentences that relate more or less to the image. The words can be read as messages or diary entries, and are sometimes merely short and unsentimental comments on existence. There is something singular about Eriksson’s painting The Prize Winner. In a bright doorway onto a dark pictorial space, as in an old photograph, stands a smiling, bespectacled figure, who raises one arm in a triumphant salute. But the winner is not the centre of attention in this colouristically terse scene – instead, our eyes are drawn to a small painting in the painting on the round medal hung around the prize winner’s neck!

Jan Håfström’s works are brimming with autobiographical references. Travel and memories going back to his childhood have figured prominently in his art. Like a musician sampling sounds, Håfström sources his imagery from diverse fields, including traditional Christian icons and contemporary comics. His most familiar character is Mr Walker, the Phantom’s – and the artist’s – alter ego, who appears repeatedly. Håfström’s works oscillate between past and present, and the recurring theme of death is a presence that opens up for formulating thoughts about life. Many of his pieces that concern human existence have explicit literary sources, such as the painting The Seventh Round, which can be read as an existential emblem, or an intuitive variation on the theme of la via dolorosa, the Way of Suffering that Jesus wandered with the cross on the road to his crucifixion on Golgotha. The painting shows an emaciated Christ-like boxer, a man who has chosen his own painful path. Suffering is something we all have to handle, but, in the words of the artist, we can endure and survive through art.

Ingela Johansson endows apparently insignificant everyday things with new dignity. Across her canvases, an array of ordinary objects – a china figurine, a cup, a lamp foot or a compass – hovers in the way they might be scattered across a table in a flea market. Together, they present a still life of memories, like visual diary notes. Only the artist knows the story behind the items that appear in each painting, leaving us free to interpret their symbolism and create our own idea of what they represent. In Back and Forth from the Podium, a small figure is moving towards, or from, a podium shaped like a Greco-Roman column capital, and to the right of them is a handsome trophy, perhaps a prize for the winner? A hand is another recurring element in her works. In art history, “the artist’s hand” is a concept that is often used to signify the originator’s particular imprint on the work. In general, a hand can symbolise artistic expression or introspection, inviting reflection on artistic creativity.

In her sculptures, performances, videos and textiles, Éva Mag explores physical and mental conditions and relationships, along with movement and change. Music, song, dance and sewing have been integral to her life since childhood, and all are vital to her artistic practice. A recurring feature has been the life-size textile bodies she sewed and filled with soft clay, which lends them the rather unsettling appearance of being alive. Mag herself interacted with them, in Sisyphus-like attempts to make them stand on their own two legs, and she has also collaborated with dancers in experimental and physical performances where they explored and interacted with the heavy, lifeless figures to evoke movement and change. In recent years, other materials such as metal, wood and a range of objects and items have been introduced in process-based installations and performances involving dancers and other people, where play, improvisation and movement provided the key approach to the materials. With vague allusions to the contrapposto of ancient Greek sculptures, a familiar pose where the figure puts weight on one leg, making the hips tilt in one direction and the shoulders tilt in the opposite, The Ghost and its visible casting seams and creases could be seen as a homage to her once so life-like clay figures.

With simple basic shapes and suggestive colours, Ann-Jeanette Sjölander creates symmetrical hovering volumes on flat sheets. Following her earlier physical work with joined and painted wood objects, also geometrical in form, an injury prompted her to move on to less heavy materials; paper, pencil, compass and ruler. Drawing, which she previously regarded merely as a means of making drafts for her objects, proved surprisingly amenable to creating the illusion of volume. While her three-dimensional objects were mainly oriented to an equal-sided square, she now focuses on circular, radially symmetrical bodies on rectangular sheets of paper. Radial symmetry is common in both plants and animals and entails that a shape can be divided into identical pieces by lines intersecting at its centre. This gives an organic dimension to her otherwise abstract motifs. In a time-consuming method, Sjölander builds the image, starting from the middle. She begins with pencil, compass and ruler, before adding colours in shades to achieve the illusion of volume. With a wink to a legendary Swedish football commentator, Gunnar Gren, the exhibition includes The Ball is Round, a dynamic rendering of a football in blue and violet pentagons and hexagons. Gren may have meant that the final score of a game is uncertain, but in Sweden “the ball is round” has become an expression meaning that anything can happen, as is the case when looking at Sjölander’s suggestive images.

Anne Thulin’s work One Step Away was part of the exhibition with the same title that she produced in 2022 for Konsthall 16. In an exploration of the location, and with references to his grandparents, pioneers of Swedish gymnastics education, who founded the Sydsvenska gymnastikinstitutet in Lund in 1907, her installation was based on two series of photographs from J G Thulin’s book Gymnastikatlas from 1939. The book pedagogically and sequentially describes gymnastic movements. A couple of these were chosen and blown up larger than life, which blurred the contours and made the figures in the images seem abstract, to a degree that made the viewer unsure of what they saw. The focus on one single frozen image from a movement paradoxically conveys stillness and weight. The positions of the bodies in these detached pictures are often so simple that they give the illusion of a graphic symbol, which ties in with Thulin’s long and multifaceted interest in language – visual language, body language, sign language. Here, the focus is on the language of movement.

Even as a child, Martin Wickström was into technology and model-building, but when he started at the Royal Institute of Art, he focused wholeheartedly on painting before realising that his two interests were compatible. Consisting of familiar objects with a certain patina that he found at flea markets, his works often combined domestic cosiness with a sense of unease, when the visually enjoyable humour proved to have a deeply serious side. The same duality is found in his later multidimensional paintings. Often divided and complemented with sculptural objects, they hone in on parts of our surroundings that we might normally only see in the corner of our eye. A large collection of photographs inherited from his father, spanning more than four decades from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, provided a vital starting point. The atmospheric motifs portray his childhood in Finspång, from intimate family life to international political events, simultaneously conveying both personal and collective memories. Any flaws in the old photos have been faithfully copied, all in colours that ooze 1950s and 1960s nostalgia. Several works, also from other parts of the world, show atmospheric shadows playing on the façade of buildings. Among these is the painting Kaknäs. Through the tree branches, the autumn sun throws shadows on a low, green wood building by the Kaknäs sportsgrounds, and natures colours suggest the last warmth of late summer.

Together, the works by this year’s artists invite us to reflect on themes relating to time, motion, body, identity and struggle. In memory of Tore, we once more highlight selected works from his collection, hoping that they will spark your curiosity and lead to contemplation and discussion.

Ulrika Levén, curator