Artists

Alex Israel, Fredrik Værslev, Anna Uddenberg, Will Sheldon, Matias Faldbakken, Emma Stern, Alex Da Corte, Petra Cortright, Hannah Taurins, Rūtė Merk, Gus Monday, Sun Woo, Hanna Lidén, Nathalie Djurberg

Press release

Gullringsbo Konstsamling is delighted to present ‘Dire Straits’, an exhibition curated by Benjamin Godsill, a leading authority on late 20th- and early 21st-century art. Drawn from the collection, it will be on view to the public from 25 April 2026 for one year. “We seem to be standing at a precipice: a jumping off point. But don’t we always? And, to a certain extent, we always are. Every passing moment creates a cascading tree of roads not taken. Collectively (and individually) we find ourselves on the road we did take, and we are not sure it was the correct exit, and we can’t find anywhere to get-off and turn-around. As a culture we are in dire straits – a very bad situation and there is no off-ramp. This exhibition documents this moment in time: how artists are thinking, making and reimagining what could be. Drawn from the Gullringsbo collection, assembled over almost two decades with select recent additions as well as several loans from simpatico collections, the artworks assembled can be read as a new navigational system for un-charted waters. The artists included in ‘Dire Straits’ propose- in their varied projects-a heterogeneous set of strategies for reckoning with the now. They explore how we got here, where we are and whisper ideas of where we may be going. Alex Da Corte is one of the most important artists working today and the Gullringsbo collection has considerable key holdings of his work. ‘Dire Straits’ gives the entirety of the Hill Gallery over to his practice, focusing on his dynamic two-dimensional work. Da Corte’s work mines our collective pop-culture-soaked subconscious to create works that are surreal memento mori for a culture adrift in disposable images. In the Tower Gallery, the exhibition brings together a variety of artists who are looking at the state of the human body and the built environment today. Artists like Hannah Taurins, Rūtė Merk and Will Sheldon reimagine portraiture for our post digital referent filled age. And painters including Gus Monday and Sun Woo are re-constructing the world(s) our bodies inhabit. Both approaches hi-light the precarity of the human experience now. Hanna Lidén, Matias Faldbakken and Fredrik Værslev depict a physical and cultural world coming apart. Installed in the Canal Gallery these artists enact snap-shots of entropy, of the moments pre-staging a collapse that is potentially final. There is a violence and a menace here but also a strange elegance that skirts beauty. In the Ocean Gallery we find a collection of artists who are reimagining what a future could look like; neither utopian nor dystopian. Artists like Petra Cortright, Alex Israel and Emma Stern offer suggestions, or manifestations of a new way of seeing and being, whilst Nathalie Djurberg and Anna Uddenberg postulate new forms that bodies can take in a post-human world. All endings are really beginnings by another name, especially when no U-turns are possible. And perhaps this dire strait is not a dead-end after all. Instead, it’s a bridge from one system of thinking and being to another. A new way of seeing and of being. Perhaps detached from rigorous logic and attached to a more magical, holistic mode of world-making.” – Benjamin Godsill