About
If anybody were to write an art and architecture history of Stockholm during the 2010s, their account would be less than accurate if it left out the sapphire-blue, shimmering, erect penis she painted on Kronobergsväggen on Kungsholmen. Although it has been painted over now, in its day, it was every bit as obvious and real as the spire of the Riddarholmen Church, and it remains carved into many people’s memories as a surprising, powerful, sometimes disarming, and sometimes provocative, addition to the cityscape. Its jubilant, shameless, outrageous obscenity and sparkle have made it a part of our shared history.
How could she? How did she have the nerve? For Carolina Falkholt, though, it doesn’t come down to nerve: it comes down to necessity. Deep within, behind the big, made-up eyes and the wild hair, there is a force that seems to be connected to the big bang, the explosive power shared by all living things. This exhibition at CFHILL marks the first of a series of works she will be showing after having spent some time away from the public eye. The energy, with the glowing ejections of blue, pink, and red, with a fine-meshed, calming web covering it, is familiar from her monumental murals. However, one senses that there is something new here, something more deliberate and questing.
The isolation of the studio, and the inherent slowness and intimacy of paper, as opposed to the public, large spaces that spray paint demands, have brought out new dimensions of Carolina Falkholt’s art. Thoughtful, lyrical mental webs, working their way through the fibres, bit by bit, like some pedantic geographer methodically charting unknown lands, or a shaman’s repetitive, ritual use of symbols for communicating with the voices of spirits. A belly button, a hand, transitions into a continent, the coastline thinning to a veil, almost disappearing into the white. Other sections form opaque land masses made of feathers, glistening church windows, and rough scales.
What is this land that grows so slowly, organically heaving itself across the image? I find no obvious references or connections to the world of graffiti, which is where Carolina Falkholt started out. My mind goes instead to another Swedish artist who never quite felt at home in Sweden, and sought the freedom he needed in New York: Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976). His iconographically dense, mysterious Ade-Ledic-Nander (1955) seems like it could be a sibling of sorts to Carolina Falkholt’s mental maps. These semi-representative, anthropomorphous islands with their fragmented coastlines tell stories that cannot be communicated in any existing language. They are like concrete, physical abstractions in a way. They don’t relate to anything, but they throb with life. Just like Fahlström, Carolina Falkholt takes a keen interest in symbols, forms, languages, and the organic-political domain. A new grammar for a new, more precise description of reality. While Fahlström sought to trace the geopolitical power relations, Caroline Falkholt follows those subterranean paths that touch on subjects like domestic violence, rage, and payback in the sacred name of sexuality. Because of this, she has far more in common with earlier, pioneering performance artists from the second wave of feminism, like Yayoi Kusama’s powerful enactments in which she used her own body to experiment with the healing power of repetition, or the bold vulnerability of Hanna Wilkes’s vaginas sculpted from chewing gum, or, perhaps most of all, Carolee Schneemann’s shamanistic poetry readings, during which she produces rolls of paper from her body. Another relevant reference that comes to mind when viewing Carolina Falkholt’s most recent works is the watercolour paintings of Louise Bourgeois, in which body parts form desolate landscapes.
Carolina Falkholt grew up in Dals Långed in Dalsland, where her parents spent all their time working on their restaurant. She was expected to help out early on–one of her responsibilities was exterminating flies! The restaurant was located near a farm. Reading about her life in articles and interviews–of which there are a fair number by now–reveals the story a solitary child who found herself torn between two extremes: on the one hand, the high-achieving horseback rider, and on the other hand, the girl who ventures into the night to join the criminals who “bomb” concrete surfaces, using metal cans with insect-like nozzles to defy the social contract. Young men, with very few exceptions. The inner drive and necessity of spraying and painting, of living outside the law, made Carolina Falkholt’s rise to fame and admiration inevitable, and has helped her strike a balance that’s entirely her own for her life as an artist. She calls this method “grafitta”. Today, Carolina Falkholt enjoys a unique position in the world of art: she is seen by all, loved, enraged, and knows no fear. If art, then, is a matter of life and death, why should there be thresholds between what’s inside and what’s outside? How could a veiny, bulging, locked-and-loaded azure-blue cock that’s several meters high be anything but a celebration of vindictive life force? Encountering this artist is, ultimately, to encounter the fundamental terms of art. All or nothing. And, coupled with that, a readiness to venture into uncharted territories.
