Artists

Gunilla Klingberg

Press release

In her long-awaited return to the gallery space, Gunilla Klingberg presents a new body of work rooted in deeply personal experience. Distributed through the three rooms of Galerie Nordenhake, the artist explores themes around absence and transition in three distinct series and a wall-mounted sculpture. What remains when someone leaves us? Where do we find the lingering traces of their presence? Klingberg explores these questions with the raw nerve of lived experience. Drawing on the writings of Jane Bennett, she challenges the view of matter as passive, proposing instead that all materials possess a "vibrant agency." She searches for and reveals this charged quality in otherwise "inert" materials like worn clothes, the keys of a laptop, a rock. Three of the four groups of works employ aluminium – the most common metal in the earth's crust and in a cycle of constant reuse – a loop that recalls reincarnation. All the materials are linked through their transformation. As in previous work, Klingberg amplifies the visceral nature of her subject through a metronomic rhythm of repetition. The largest room is clad in a suite of seven large-scale silkscreen prints. Printing itself is the result of contact and pressure, transmission and transference. Grainy and textural, the prints initially suggest a digital moiré effect. However, these deeply analog images of cloths and leather soon reveal themselves: stitch and weave, warp and weft, grain and grime. They are the hems and seams worn thin by years of contact. Blown up and zoomed in, we see the crossroads of denim selvedge in the crotch of a pair of jeans; a shirt collar impregnated and patinated with oils from the skin; a frayed breast pocket that hung against the chest. This exploration of points of contact continues in the next room with a streak of frottages hanging in a line. Each rubbing conjures the same object: the keyboard of a MacBook Air. As if searching for fingerprints in the wake of a disappearance, Klingberg strokes a graphite stick across a sheet of paper on the tap-tap-tapped laptop keyboard in a process of primitive printing. Like a Xerox, a repeated image is generated, but with the inherent variations of the hand. Each smudge of keys is different; waves of movement with their own momentum. Like a detective, Klingberg scans the surface for traces of its owner. The anodised aluminium, implied but absent in the laptop images, manifests instead as a semi-transparent architecture of hanging screens. Their patterned perforations cast shifting shadows and light across the walls and floors as the sun passes. The matrix of geometric shapes reveals a typography: the palindrome DÖD (Dead). This meta-architecture creates a veiled view of the exhibition. A liminal space manifests itself and evokes Bardo – the Tibetan Buddhist concept of an intermediate state between death and rebirth. Finally, in the room that we at the gallery call "the chapel", Klingberg presents an aluminium cast of a rock found on her property in Sörmland. The original form is an Erratic Rock, carried far from its origins by glacial forces, scarred by its grinding, frictional journey. Here the aluminium cast is stretched and distorted – in a state of transformation. It, too, bears typography: three "G"s. Imprinted onto this incongruous material the glyphs evoke ancient runes, bridging the past, present, and future.