Picking the Best Numbers: Stockholm Art Week 2024

Anchored around Market, Stockholm’s leading art fair, Stockholm Art Week will take place in the Nordic capital May 14th-19th, 2024. The new gallery Antics is responsible for a book section as part of Market, at Fotografiska Jeff Cowen, exhibiting his photographs of Berlin from 2007 to 2023, will host a Masterclass with Knut Koivisto, Sergels Torg will be the stage of a plethora of programming, the contemporary art museum in the archipelago Artipelag offers reduced admission. and PR-maven and Stockholm Art Week’s founder Joanna Sundström will discuss art, commerce, and branding with art and luxury brand industry professionals at Soho House.

Setting itself apart from other international art fairs, Market has a focus on galleries and artists from the Nordic region—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway—and, evidence of the vibrant artistic region and its market, presents more than 47 galleries and 100 artists. As many Nordic gallerists know, Sweden has one of the world’s highest proportions of “dollar billionaires” per capita. According to the Forbes 2024 rich list, 43 people registered in Sweden were worth $1bn or more (which is more than the 12 listed in the oil-rich country Norway). And, according to a 2021 study, there were 542 “kronor billionaires;” Swedes worth over $100 million, a rise from 23 people in 1996. Although she does not mention art collecting, Superrich Swedes, a new BBC documentary podcast episode by Stockholm-based British journalist Maddy Savage, delves deeper into the matter. Money is the foundation for a thriving art market. But, of course, one need not be a billionaire (in any currency) to acquire art, and chiefly, the most interesting art is readily available to the public at little or no cost.

With over 60 participating institutions, organizations, galleries, and venues and 150 events and programs Stockholm Art Week is the first in a string of European art weeks (followed by Amsterdam, London, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, and finally Vienna, in November) who have come together under the network Spider. Calendering is a numbers game, focusing on Stockholm we have listed a few events to help keep your timetable in check.

Performances and Parties

Opening Party at Statens Konstråd

Stockholm Art Week opens with a speech by the Mayor of Stockholm, Karin Wanngård followed by a performance program by Statens Konstråd. Speakers at the opening include Henrik Orrje, Acting Director of the Swedish Arts Council, and Joanna Sundström, initiator of Stockholm Art Week. In the evening, the art collective IntraGalactic will present a performance program, and the digital publication and archive “Viaduktens avsked” will be launched.

IntraGalactic performances include Ögats party / Preference of the Eye, Maria Högbacke; I want to walk through the space like I am carrying grocery bags, Anita Wernström; Jag är, Malin Ståhl och Anita Wernström; Gamla Busstorget (postcards), Hiroko Tsuchimoto; Busshållsplatser i Jämtland / Bus stops in Jämtland, Malin Ståhl; Uninterrupted Dialogue (video installation), Hiroko Tsuchimoto; The Caring Act of Archiving (performance lecture), Kajsa Sandström; Breven till våra barn, IntraGalactic arts collective

Tuesday May 14th, 4:30-7:30PM, Statens Konstråd. Svensksundsvägen 11a. RSVP essential to stockholmartweek.se/inauguration

Reception celebrating Yves Scherer at Hospitalet

An exhibition of Swiss New York-based artist Yves Scherer reopens the old mental asylum Hospitalet in Danvikstull after an extensive renovation. Carl Kostyál is a London-based gallery with rotating outposts at architecturally unique venues in Stockholm—their rooster includes Jon Rafman, Al Freeman, and Gina Beavers, with a longer list of exhibited artists. Scherer’s show features 12 artworks based on photographs of Kate Moss taken by Mario Sorrenti, as well as other sculptural works.

Wednesday, May 15, 5:30-6:30 PM, Hospitalet, 15 Sjökvarnsbacken, Nacka, Stockholms län, 131 71.

Performance: ‘We dive, we float, we sink, we sing, we turn upwards’

With a stupendous view of Kungsholmen, taking place in the rooftop pool at Clarion Hotel Sign, and exploring the body as a sculpture in motion, Alexandra Larsson Jacobson has created a choreography set to Mira Eklund’s specially composed sound and music, in a performance featuring synchronized swimmers (from Konstsim creative) interacting with Larsson’s floating sculptures. Just as a human body consists of several parts, the swimmers use their bodies to make kaleidoscopic and mirroring formations that create a new, collective body. Mira Eklund performs her music live as an integral part of the work.

The performance is supported by Tore A Jonasson’s foundation and Riksidrottsmuseum—who annually acquire sports-related art and award several grants to artists and sports practitioners—and held in conjunction with Larsson Jacobson’s exhibition We Play, I Push, You Hold, We Fall at Konsthall C.

Wednesday, May 15th. Doors open at 6 pm, performances at 6.30 & 7.30 pm. The bar in the lounge of Selma City Spas lounge is open between 6 – 8 pm. Selma City Spa, 8th floor, Clarion Hotel Sign, Östra Järnvägsgatan 35, Norra Bantorget.

Artists to Watch

Vaginal Davis at Moderna Museet et. al.

The Iconic performance artist, writer, filmmaker, nightlife impresario, and queer activist Vaginal Davis’s solo exhibition “Magnificent Product.” initiated by Moderna Museet, spans several institutions, each approaching Davis’s artistry from different angles. Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Tensta konsthall, and MDT (Moderna Dansteatern). U.S.-born and Berlin-based, Davis has a global reach, and her work loudly traverses punk, glamor, racial, and politics, in avant-garde modes. ‘

In an Art Basel Series interview published earlier this year, she comments: “To say I was a precocious child is putting it mildly. I was known as Little Lady Faunt-Lawyer for my barrage of endless inquiries. I demanded detailed answers almost as if I were a laborious trial attorney drilling a lead witness on the stand. I drove my poor, dear, long-suffering mother and older sisters completely batty. I was a needy brat, selfish and egotistical, who could never get enough attention. Those were my good qualities. I guess not much has changed.”

The opening reception will take place Friday, May 17, 2024, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at Moderna Museet on Exercisplan 4.

Marie Louise Ekman at Market (CF Hill)

Sweden’s Grand Dame of Contemporary Art, Marie-Louise Ekman, will exhibit new glass works made in Murano in CFHill’s booth at Market. Her iconic aesthetic, cultivated during the 70s, features pastel hues, directness, and humor, rendering her work instantly recognizable. In intimate scenes, she allows life’s relationships and absurdities to unfold organically, breathing life into a diverse cast of human and non-human characters that explore everyday absurdities and the challenges presented by societal constructs. Ekman’s impactful career includes influential positions as head of the Royal Institute of Art in and the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Her recent works “Testamentet” (2023) is installed at the Stockholm School of Economics and a large retrospective is scheduled to take place at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 2025.

“Man får göra som man vill,” translated to, ‘one may do as one likes,’ is a statement first included in her film Mamma Pappa Barn (1977), Mother Father Child, which, at a time and in a society that placed severe constraints on both women and children, was both agitating and revolutionary.

Jacob Dahlgren at Market (Andréhn-Schiptjenko and Market Talks)

Jacob Dahlgren is a Swedish multi-disciplinary conceptual artist, deeply engaged with stripes. Forming a foundation in his work, the artist incorporates his own life into his practice searching for geometric and abstract patterns that he can process into art. Starting in 2001, in his work Daily T-Shirt, he wore a striped t-shirt every day. “Concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex, and socially shared culture. Dahlgren’s repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it,” writes his gallery. There is both academicism and humor in his work.

Dahlgren will be showing in Andréhn-Schiptjenko’s booth and will speak on a panel about Stockholm School of Economics together with artists and professors in “Why art at a business school?” on Saturday, May 18, 2-2:45 PM, Market Art Fair.

Exhibitions

Malin Gabriella Nordin at Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum

Carl Eldh Studio Museum presents the artist Malin Gabriella Nordin, renowned for her colorful abstract paintings and organic compositions. With a highly personal style, Nordin’s artistry moves between drawing, painting, and collage to small and large-scale sculptures. Born in 1988, she is a graduate of Bergen Academy of Fine Arts and is educated in painting at Pernby’s in Stockholm. The studio museum of Carl Eldh, the early 20th-century sculptor who lived between 1873 and 1954, yearly invites a living artist to exhibit and intervene among nearly five hundred of the artist’s plaster casts and works. Nordin’s exhibit is an intuitive and transcendental painting practice that, at Carl Eldh’s, evolved into new sculptural forms.

16 May-29 September at Carl Eldhs Ateljémuseum, Lögebodavägen 10, 113 47 Stockholm.

The Joan Arcs at Goethe Institute

Joan Didion’s obituary in the New York Times states: “Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities, and incipient chaos came naturally.” Didion, a writer, playwright, and journalist, came to prominence in the 1960s capturing the moods of social unrest and in the 70s incorporating her personal experiences of psychological fragmentation in her work. Touted as a protagonist of a new form of journalism she was a changemaker in the world of writing and reporting. At the Goethe-Institut, the exhibition “The Joan Arcs” showcases the works of three artists: Felix Vasquez Aguilera, Hannes Michanek, and Marta Galindo (all new names on the Stockholm art scene), who were inspired by Didion’s writings in their creative processes.

Opening reception, Wednesday, May 15, 5:00-7:00 PM. Otherwise, the exhibition may be visited during the library’s open hours: Monday – Thursday, 2–5 PM. 12A BryggargatanStockholm, Stockholms län, 111 21.

Jorunn Hancke Øgstad Forever Fantasies Presented by Eva Livjin-Olin and Ulrika Flinck

Jorunn Hancke Øgstad is a Norwegian artist exploring the language of abstraction through painting and sculpture. Using fabric dye, resin, and plastics on unprimed canvas, the artist mimics watercolor, spray paint, and print processes, often within the same work, co-opting techniques commonly found in expressionist, street, and pop art practices. Traversing historical periods in art and design, Øgstad finds inspiration everywhere from 19th-century spiritual abstraction to the work of female contemporaries.

Exhibited at Eva Livjin-Olin’s intimate home gallery—where Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Jeanette Ehler, Isaac Julien, and Jeanette Hayes, among others, have shown—Hancke Øgstad’s new body of work features bleaching and blocking processes which see areas of the works become translucent, thereby engaging with the interior letting light through the surface of the work.

Open by RSVP or appointment. Karlaplan 14, Stockholm. Eva Livijn Olin, eva.livijn@futuragallery.se.

Markus Öhrn: Requiem for Eva-Britt at Bonniers Konsthall

Markus Öhrn presents the comprehensive Azdora project initiated in 2015 in Italy.

Eva-Britt’s deathbed revelation to Markus Öhrn, known for his internationally acclaimed stage works exploring existential themes, in the Torne Valley sparked the ten-year collaboration between him and Azdora. The group of 13 elderly women from Italy’s Emilia Romagna region express their defiance against societal norms, smashing machines, tattooing, and challenging conventions. Their collaboration embodies a radical shift of power, liberating female protagonists from patriarchal structures and societal constraints. The exhibition includes a new performance work where Öhrn and guests conduct death masses from a towering bell tower every Sunday, inspired by his grandmother Eva-Britt’s desire for a more daring life.

At the core of the exhibition stands a six-meter-high bell tower, symbolizing Eva-Britt’s longing for liberation. Öhrn’s death masses atop the tower, along with the Azdoras’ presence, serve as a tribute to influential women across generations. Visitors engage in the exhibition’s immersive experience, contemplating themes of redemption, empowerment, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artistic expression in Öhrn’s and Azdora’s provocative world.

Free entrance for all on Friday, May 17. Bonniers Konsthall, Torsgatan 19, 113 21 Stockholm.

Art Walks/Talks & Gallery Crawls

On Wednesday, May 15th, in the morning, True Love a conversation concerning the relationship between art and commerce featuring Sanna Strömbäck from Porsche, Mia Sundberg from Spritmuseum / Absolut Art Collection, journalist, author, and founding editor-in-chief of Art Notes Karolina Modig, and Tinni Ernsjö Rappe, art director at the Stockholm School of Economics, moderated by Stockholm Art Week’s founder Joanna Sundström, will be held at Soho House. Breakfast will be served. RSVP essential: info@stockholmartweek.com.

On Thursday, May 16th, 3-4 PM, an art walk (starting point: Odenplan) will take participants on a walk towards Vasaparken to encounter art from different periods. Most of the works were commissioned through a change in the area around Sabbatsbergsbyn in the 2000s. The walk is hosted by Stockholm (Art Tours in Stockholm) which specializes in city walks available in various languages. They cover hundreds of public sculptures and artworks as well as interesting architecture from the Middle Ages until the 21st century. No RSVP required.

On Saturday, May 18th, 10 AM-12 PM visitors are welcome to join a self-guided gallery tour with several prominent galleries in Östermalm: Saskia Neuman Gallery, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Public Service, and Dalenson Gallery. Later, galleries on Hudiksvallsgatan will also be open, and Galerie Nordenhake will open a solo exhibition featuring Cecilia Edefalk. Breakfast will be served. No RSVP required.

Useful links: Market Art Fair; Market Talks; Stockholm Art Week’s Calender, and, if you have a password, their Friend program. Enjoy Stockholm Art Week!

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