Elective Affinities
Harald Lyth
1937, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm.
Harald Lyth is a painter and graphic artist represented in some of Sweden’s foremost national collections. His work was commissioned for public spaces, including a metro station and the post office in Stockholm, alongside office buildings and the Royal Library. He produced scenographic work for the National Theatres in Oslo and Copenhagen. Lyth studied fine arts both in Gothenburg and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he became a Professor in Fine Art and taught from 1989-1994.
Wilhelm Kåge
1889–1960, Sweden. Lived and worked in Stockholm.
The artist and ceramicist began his career early on as a painter of commercial shop signs, followed by studies in watercolor and technical drawing. He studied fine art at first in Gothenburg, then in Copenhagen, as well as Munich, and took a formation in lithographic technique in Stockholm. Today, Wilhelm Kåge is best known for his work at the ceramics factory in Gustavsberg, where he was artistic director for over three decades.
Rebecca Warren
1965, UK. Lives and works in London.
As a sculptural artist Rebecca Warren predominantly works in clay, bronze, and steel. Her work is internationally best known for her exuberant clay sculptures, alongside her collages and vitrines. Warren constructs the vitrines and the wall-based collages using neon, wool, pompoms, paper, thread, and other less identifiable materials. Her bronze and unfired-clay sculptures are often like protean, corporeal presences.
Otto G. Carlsund
1897–1948, St. Petersburg. Lived and worked in Sweden.
The Swedish painter, curator and art critic began his formation as a painter in Germany and Norway, before continuing his studies at the Académie Moderne in Paris under French artist Fernand Léger. During these years Carlsund became close friends with artists Piet Mondrian and Amédée Ozenfant, among others, and acquainted himself to art movements such as Neoplasticism, Purism, and Synthetic Cubism.
Laure Prouvost
1978, France. Lives and works in Brussels.
The medium and concept of language is omnipresent in the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. The artist works often with immersive and mixed-media installations, combining film and installation in humorous and idiosyncratic ways. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and meaning.
Susanne Henriques
1948, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm.
Susanne Henriques works consistently with textiles, making yarn and color her primary tools of expression. With the weaving technique at the center of her artistic practice, the material determines surface and structure in her works, making them what she once called ‘enriched paintings’. Henriques creates motif worlds that fluctuate between the naturalistic and the abstract, often based on specific themes.
Rachel Whiteread
1963, UK. Lives and works in London.
Rachel Whiteread casts everyday settings, objects and surfaces as sculptures and drawings, thereby transforming them into ghostly replicas that can seem eerily familiar. Through these processes of casting, she frees her subject matter— ranging from beds, tables, and boxes to water towers and entire houses—from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory.
Jonas Nobel
1970, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm.
Jonas Nobel’s collages and drawings are often inspired by mass production and industrial representations. In his sculptures he frequently employs basic materials, joining together elements with opposing historical connotations. These juxtapositions challenge the viewer to create or decipher an imagined or implied narrative around political or social events taken from contemporary life. Nobel has a multifaceted practice as both an individual artist and as cofounder of art, design, and architecture group Uglycute.
Nick Cave
1959, USA. Lives and works in Chicago.
Nick Cave is an artist often working with fabric, performance and dance. Sculpted from a vast range of materials, his mixed media works frequently tackle societal and political topics, such as his Soundsuits that were made to empower the individual and created as a direct response of experiences of race and gun violence in the 1990s.
Luc Tuymans
1958, Belgium. Lives and works in Antwerp.
While an inheritor to the vast tradition of Northern European painting, Luc Tuymans’ relationship to the medium is strongly influenced by photography, television, and cinema. Interested in the lingering effects of World War II on the lives of Europeans, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, as well as the relationship between photography and painting. Through his work he offers fresh perspectives on the medium of painting, as well as larger cultural issues.
Evert Lundquist
1904–1994, Sweden. Lived and worked in Stockholm.
Evert Lundquist has shaped 20th-century Swedish art as a painter and as a teacher. His first public recognition as a young artist through an exhibition in 1934 at Stockholm’s Konstnärshuset (the Artist’s House) was followed by a mid-career retrospective of his work in 1944 at the Academy of Art, the latter regarded as his breakthrough moment. During the following decades Lundquist’s work was widely shown in Sweden, but also across Europe and North and South America.
Mark Manders
1968, Netherlands. Lives and works in Belgium.
Mark Manders artistic practice is described by the artist as an ‘ongoing self-portrait as a building’. Accordingly, he works toward one big moment that will bring together all his works, continuously interconnected and in dialogue with each other. With a firm interest in writing, literature and the way that meaning is ascribed to objects, Manders’ art can be understood as an investigation into the architecture of storytelling and the conception of the selfportrait as an artistic genre.
Lars Nilsson
1956, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm.
Lars Nilsson is an artist who does not shy away from controversial issues or the dark side of our emotional lives. Working in painting, film, photography and installations, the artist often references remote time periods and seemingly disparate genres. Nilsson was a professor of Visual Arts at Malmö Art Academy from 1995 to 2006, and his work has been shown widely internationally.
Andrea Zittel
1965, USA. Lives and works in Joshua Tree, California.
As an artist Andrea Zittel has developed and tested prototypes for living structures and situations since the early 1990s. Her practice investigates the ways in which human society constructs its values, social norms and belief systems. Based in the Californian Mojave Desert, the artist has produced works spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, video, textiles and installations.
Yinka Shonibare CBE
1962, UK. Lives and works in London.
Yinka Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and film. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, he questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. His trademark material is a brightly colored ‘African’ batik fabric from London’s Brixton market. The fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to the colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.
Georg Baselitz
1938, Germany. Lives and works in Germany.
As a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Georg Baselitz has become well known for his figurative, expressive paintings, rejecting abstraction and inviting the human figure back as a subject matter. He frequently paints his subjects upside down in an effort to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work. Drawing from a vast range of influences, including art of Soviet era illustrations, the Mannerist period and African sculptures, he developed his own, distinct artistic language.
Simon Fujiwara
1982, UK. Lives and works in Berlin.
The work of British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara is often concerned with the complex and contradictory mechanisms of contemporary society in negotiating cultural concepts and values, including the perceptions of identity and individuality. Trained as an architect as well as an artist, Fujiwara’s works frequently take the form of complex and autobiographically charged installations.
Ohad Meromi
1967, Israel. Lives and works in New York.
Ohad Meromi combines performance art, large-scale sculpture, and set and costume design in his work. The artist often creates an overarching architectural structure that can serve as a set for performances, which in turn become part of his installations. Through his works he invokes a utopian, modernist spirit and explores concepts of collaboration, improvisation, and community.
