Alex Colard

ABOUT the artist

Carin Ellberg was born in 1959 in Stockholm, where she still lives and works. She is educated at the Royal Institute of Art and since her debut in 1989 she has had a given place on the Swedish art scene. Ellberg’s works are represented in several private and public collections, including the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, Malmö Museum, Uppsala Konstmuseum and Borås Konstmuseum and she has made a number of permanent works in the public space.

ABOUT the exhibition 

Even though Carin Ellberg’s art may show elements of different movements in art history, her peculiar work is uniquely her own style. Like so many other female artists before her, private life was early reflected in her work; Ellberg has become known for using simple, everyday materials such as coffee, stockings and clothes in sculptures and paintings. Since 1985, she has also worked in parallel and regularly with a series of renowned, painted self-portraits – currently 622 in number. All with similar design: bust format in three-quarter profile.

If the domestic, everyday life, expressed through unconventional materials, in the beginning was a central theme in Ellberg’s art, her work has increasingly opened up to her approach to the eternal questions and in her exhibition at the gallery Ellberg’s holistic conviction crystallizes. With nature as a starting point, more specifically the ever-changing sea landscape as a motif, Carin Ellberg visualizes a symbolic realm rather than an external landscape.

The stones in the title of the exhibition are the ancient objects that link us to the eternal and the threads connect the spiritual with the material world. In her sculptures, paintings and watercolours, a central form reappears: the oval. It alludes to the face or the mirror image where the other becomes oneself, it is the form that symbolizes that all people belong together. The symbol can also be found as spheres in pink glass at the ends of sculptures made of iron rods that float in the room like lines or wires. These hanging sculptures reflect Ellberg’s paintings and the shapes are in turn found in the watercolours, which with their semi-abstract figures repeat the theme. The colour scale consists of muted pastels which for Ellberg are colours that she physically relates to, where pink is a central colour that stands for both body and spirit.

The exhibition’s diverse techniques and materials, with interwoven motifs and themes in two- and three-dimensional form, become a metaphor for the holistic worldview that permeates Carin Ellberg’s art: everything belongs together, everything is connected.

ABOUT the gallery 

Since its inception in 1991 Andréhn-Schiptjenko has consistently been committed to working on an international arena and to the long-term representation of emerging and established contemporary artists from all over the world working with painting, sculpture, photography, film and digital media as well as installation-based and site-specific work.

With a profound interest in exhibition as form, the gallery has presented shows that have become seminal, successfully launching the careers of Scandinavian artists such as Cajsa von Zeipel, Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Annika von Hausswolff and Matts Leiderstam, and giving artists such as Uta Barth, Cecilia Bengolea, José León Cerrillo, Martín Soto Climent, Ridley Howard, Tony Matelli, and Xavier Veilhan their first European or Scandinavian one-person exhibition. In recent years the gallery has also exhibited work by deceased artists such as Francesca Woodman and Siri Derkert, successfully renewing critical and public interest in their work.

Having established itself as one of the leading galleries in Scandinavia, the gallery enjoys privileged relationships with museums and collectors and is also involved in projects in the public space. In 2019 the gallery moved to a new space in the center of Stockholm and as way of expanding the gallery’s international scope in a more permanent way also opened a second space in Paris, allowing for a closer relationship with the gallery’s international network.

Andréhn-Schiptjenko has for soon three decades participated in international art fairs – Art Basel, Independent New York and Brussels, CHART Copenhagen, Material Art Fair Mexico City and FIAC Paris. It is owned and directed by Ciléne Andréhn and Marina Schiptjenko, both with a long history of being active in the art world beyond the gallery, as selection committee-members of art fairs and board members of institutions and the Swedish National Gallery Association. https://www.andrehn-schiptjenko.com/

Linnégatan 31, 114 47 Stockholm, Sweden

Tuesday – Friday 11-18
Saturday 12-16

info@andrehn-schiptjenko.com