Charlotte Gyllenhammar Believe My Eyes

“Where language ends, image begins.”

Contemplating a long career in art can produce quite different experiences of times gone by. Some people seem to follow rather linear paths, with a branch or two along the way. But when it comes to Charlotte Gyllenhammar, it’s more like walking through a landscape. Your surroundings seem familiar. The signs are all the same, the basic principles are the ones you expect. But it seems as though the image deepens a little each time. A tactile spatiality emerges; pure, simple, and stringent.

In her new exhibition at CFHILL, Gyllenhammar presents entirely new works, which in her case tends to mean reformulations of some of her established constants: the worktable, the mountain, the child, the relief, human proportions, and the relationships between the objects. Engaging in dialogue with, or perhaps simply referring to, Sprängning and its inverted reliefs, is Turn, Prostrate, Elevate, which manifests as convex shapes protruding into the space. Figures, facing away from us, with their arms extended, so that the garments they are draped in take on the shape of a mountain. Also recurring is the worktable, the absolute epicentre of the studio and the artist’s life, the true “zero point”. The surface of the table is the place where only the most essential items can be granted sufficient leeway to reclaim every bit of their spatiality. 

It’s tempting to compare Gyllenhammar’s work to that of a philosopher. Initially, her thought is wild, and bold. Next, she sends it out into the world, to test it against other realities. Will it hold? If it does, it can be adjusted afterwards, yes, even subjected to violence, to push its durability to the limit. Her eye for the vulnerable aspects of humanity and her consistent and severe, yet loving and playful, relationship with materials combine to make her one of the most significant Swedish artists of her generation. 

Charlotte Gyllenhammar belongs to a generation of artists who entered their professions at a time when the art world was undergoing extensive changes. Modernism, with its utopian faith in universals, had definitely imploded under the weight of new ideas and impulses that were arriving from other sources than the customary Western, white ones. Indian artist Anish Kapoor, whose works Gyllenhammar encountered during her time in London, was an important influence, as was the anti-academic anarchist Marie-Louise Ekman, who was the first-ever female vice-chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art. 

Believe My Eyes will be Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s first major solo exhibition at CFHILL. We feel privileged to have been granted this opportunity to develop this presentation with her.