Current exhibition

By Axel Andersson – historian, author & lecturer at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm

"When I first encountered Åsa Jungnelius’s Snippan in a group exhibition many years ago, it felt as if I were standing before an object seemingly birthed from a celestial body - both distant and strangely familiar. It was as impossible to enter as it was to remain unaffected beside it. The world of the artwork bled into the world around me with its intensity. I remember it as if it were yesterday: how completely present I was in the room, while simultaneously forgetting everything else that existed there - everything except Snippan and me.

"Snippan" is the answer to an unfathomable question, not unlike the origin of life. This early seminal work invites us to question how we and the artwork can co-exist. Rather than being mere spectators, the work and Jungnelius’s visual world urges us to become active participants, oscillating between entering and withdrawing.

What begins with a breath - the glassblower’s puff at its core - gives life to a shell, from which the creator slowly retreats in order to invite an audience. We witness how the work’s interior come into being at the very same moment it becomes a façade. An inside-out transformation, born of a female experience, that boldly embraces the grandiose, the monumental, and the universally human. Jungnelius has continued to explore cavities, passages, channels, vessels, and frames across a wide range of works. An exploration that culminates in a quietly profound realization: there is a world outside the artwork, and one within.

Jungnelius is one of our most celebrated contemporary artists, perhaps because she so masterfully unveils the threshold between viewer and object. This unveiling is manifested in the works brought together in this exhibition - not least those that are also functional objects, where the line between observer and user is playfully challenged and implicitly politicized. There is a consistent presence of this simultaneous boundary and openness between us and the artwork, which recurs across various materials, contexts, and ideas throughout Jungnelius’s long and rich body of work. Her visual world is unique precisely because of this consistency. It is even present in how she presents herself as an artist, in her public persona. With Jungnelius, surface is never superficial - nor is it false. Instead, the tension between the interior and exterior of the work is almost always physically palpable."