Ulla Wiggen, Passage, Västerås Art Museum, Västerås
A couple of weeks before Ulla Wiggen’s retrospective opened at Västerås Art Museum, the Swedish art critic Peter Cornell – to whom the artist was married in the 70s – passed away. Seeing her four portraits of him from that time made me experience painting as an act of love. Wiggen’s preoccupation with machines and their inner workings also carries a strong erotic energy. Behind You (1971) depicts Cornell’s face, heavily cropped, where the centre of the painting is the jawline and the right ear. Behind him, the sun is burning bright. At the top edge, you see the eye looking upward, toward the sky and the light. That is how I want to remember Cornell: clear and forward-looking. Wiggen’s exhibition was exquisite.
Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer, Dansens Hus, Stockholm
Florentina Holzinger’s A Year Without Summer opened with an intergenerational lesbian orgy that went on for thirty minutes, and was one of the best things I’ve seen in years. The rest of her large-scale performance was unsettling and, at times, uneven – an anti-musical. But the work keeps tearing things open in me, and I can’t stop thinking about it. The final scene was a grand faeces-fest, where the elderly women’s diapers leaked and eventually drowned the world in shit. Austrian, yes, but above all a lovely fantasy of geriatric revenge, where our ageing population gets to strike back at the welfare state’s alienating accelerationism.
When We See Us, Liljevalchs+, Stockholm
Gigantic exhibitions always risk becoming impenetrable, but not this jewel! The sheer number of works was almost ungraspable. Despite that, the hanging felt airy: room after room presented most of the works non-hierarchically and accessibly. In this century of Black figurative painting, you could wander for hours and be surprised, overturned, delighted, made to think. They also skipped overblown didacticism – thank goodness. Is it possible to forget Aaron Douglas’s Boy with a Toy Plane (1938) or Beauford Delaney’s Untitled (Man in African Dress) (1970)? Never.
– Jesper Strömbäck Eklund is an art critic and a regular contributor to Kunstkritikk and Expressen.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
