Current exhibition

Klara Kristalova

The song of everything

May 6 – September 26, 2021

This year, the Carl Eldh Studio Museum welcomes Klara Kristalova as the ninth in a row of summer exhibitors since the re-inauguration of the museum in 2013. As the pandemic is still a big part of our lives, changes and adaptions have become facets of our everyday life. Within Kristalova’s visual world change is predominant as well, oftentimes through hybrids of humans and other kinds of life; animals, trees – sometimes even stones. This focus on life and the human is also a part of Carl Eldh’s oeuvre, although the human in Kristalova’s world is almost always represented by girls or women.

The border between the human and other living organisms is deliberately undetermined, or fluid in Kristalova’s work, as is sometimes the case in Eldh’s sculptures as well. But while his sculpture of a woman may be titled Lady’s Mantle (a perennial flower), her The Birch is both woman and birch. Animals and other creatures have also populated the studio this season. Some of them are so well-integrated we hardly notice them, while others claim their space and seem to have settled in for good. What awaits the visitor are encounters which are likely to bring the entire environment a new life, as a place where everything is possible.

A new world opens up and the creatures occupy their places as if they had forever belonged there, the girly figures too. Contrasts morph into kinships and the studio is charged with humorous energy and phantasy. Two artistries meet and Eldh’s sculptures are once again afforded a different light.

Among all the figures of girls, animal-like creatures and hybrids of nature and human, a large mouth in glazed stoneware with red lips has slipped into the museum, along with a textile version with the same half-open mouth, as though it were singing. The mouth, this part of the human face that painted red is associated with woman in particular can also be interpreted as the source of life and the location of the sense of taste. Today, this once life-giving breath is potentially life-threatening as the virus spreads with each exhalation, threatening the sense of taste of the infected. However, the mouth is not limited to just tasting and inspiring, it can also speak and sing. In a time when physical encounters are limited and life persists on a low flame, it is especially exciting to welcome visitors to an exhibition that affirms, confirms, and focuses on the living – The Song of Everything.

The exhibition features old as well as new work by Kristalova in a range of different materials, including glazed stoneware and porcelain, watercolors and textile.

 

Klara Kristalova (born 1967 in Prague) studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Since her debut in 1994 she has had a large number of solo exhibitions in Europe, the United States, and Asia and her work has also circulated via group exhibitions to Canada and Australia. The solo exhibitions include Turning Into Stone, Norton Museum of Art, USA (2015), Klara Kristalova, Gothenburg Museum of Art (2012), Klara Kristalova, Bonniers Konsthall (2012), and New Work Series, San Francisco MOMA, USA (2011). Kristalova has taken part in group exhibitions including Human After All, The Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics, Holland (2020-), Signature Women, Artipelag (2020), Yellow Creature, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2017), Generosity, National Gallery, Czech Republic (2016), and Luc Tuymans: A Vision of Central Europe, Brygge, Belgium (2010).

Her public artworks include A walk, a memorial over the writer Karin Boye in Huddinge (2020), What Holds Me Back Carries Me Further in Gothenburg (2019), The Girl that Disappeared in Norrtälje (2011), Touched by Flowers in Tungelsta Garden Park in Haninge, Stockholm (2007) and Fall in the Albanova neighborhood in Stockholm (2001), not far from Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum.  Kristalova’s works are included in the collections of the National Museum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Uppsala Art Museum, Bror Hjorths Hus in Uppsala, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Public Art Agency Sweden, EMMA (Esbo Museum of Modern Art) in Finland, and several museums in the United States, such as the Rubell Museum in Miami, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.

Kristalova has received several grants and awards, such as Bror Hjorthföreningens drawing scholarship (1994), Maria Bonnier Dahlin’s grant (1994), IASPIS international grant, London (1997), Ester Lindahl’s grant (1999), Norrtälje cultural grant (1998), and the Norrtälje cultural prize (2020). She has been a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts since 2012.

Klara Kristalova is represented by Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm, Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and Lehmann Maupin in New York.

An exhibition catalogue is also available, with an essay by Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, art critic and Professor of Art History at Södertörn University, Stockholm.

An artist talk between Klara Kristalova and Katarina Wadstein MacLeod will be held in the museum Tuesday June 1, 6 - 7 pm.

Please see Current for exhibition reviews and articles.

The exhibition is made possible by generous support from Swedish Arts Council, Pontus Bonnier, Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, The Royal Patriotic Society, Magnus Karlsson Gallery and Stockholms stad.

 

 

 

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Lögebodavägen 10
Bellevueparken,
Stockholm

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Carl Eldhs Ateljémuseum
Lögebodavägen 10
SE-113 47 STOCKHOLM

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