Lena Cronqvist, Selected Works, Angelika Knäpper, Stockholm
When an artist’s vision becomes too poor to paint, they can start with a black base and add colourful and bright layers on top of it. Then can they can see what they are working on. Lena Cronqvist’s three paintings at Angelika Knäpper depict light and shadow, and three girls – two with parasols and one without – illuminated against a dark background. The girl without seems to be looking at a shadow falling from our left, her right. Reportedly, this was Cronqvist’s last work, and the perspective must be of a kind that I cannot possibly imagine.
Nicklas Randau, Courtyard, Curated by Ebba de Faire c/o Sotheby’s, Stockholm
Nicklas Randau approaches painting through a poetic lens that I myself have a complicated relationship to. Perhaps it’s a generational issue: 2010s versus 1990s. What maybe separates us most is his starting point in the material’s possibility for making meaning without taking detours through figuration or other pictorial constructions. Randau focuses on the act of painting and paint as substance on a surface, after the idea and before the result. Amongst reasons and references, he places great trust in what happens to arise (images, gestures), and insists on the presence of painting in its own simultaneously insignificant and assertive right.
Sirous Namazi, Pending, Magasin III, Stockholm
I think it’s a real feat to make use of your own biography and take it so far that the works stand as independently as they did in Sirous Namazi’s exhibition at Magasin III. Fragments of memories of a lost home and the cross-stitches, pixels, that build an image: on different levels, it all seemed to be about components of something larger. There is hope in the fact that the crumbs forming a reality can take on new shapes. The works were installed as if in a warehouse or a space for work-in-progress, further suggesting that temporariness is both possible and inevitable.
Viktor Kopp is an artist living in Stockholm. During the past year he had a solo exhibition at Celsius Projects in Malmö and a duo exhibition with Marcus Matt at Cecilia Hillström Gallery in Stockholm.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
