Review: Picturesque storytelling delights in Stockholm galleries

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

The word “I” appears in the exhibition titles of both Kristina Abelli Elander and Amanda Hellsten, even though the artists present quite different self-images. At the Cornelia Sojdelius gallery, Abelli Elander continues to work with her well-known alter egos in the colorful, explosive punk comic style. Contoured Barbie women in tight dresses and tousled hair – but no actual weapons.

Here they embrace death itself with flower sprouts for arms. It’s a kind of highly contested cultural template that the artist simultaneously supports and resists. In a thought bubble to one of the self-confident girls I read: “…I want more…”

And there’s more to come, as the surprise of the exhibition is a series of aquarium-like cabinets from the 80s that Abelli Elander restored to new condition after a flood. Dioramas with everything extra and with maintained energy. The display cases are anchored on slender legs and feature a variety of image details illuminated with colored light. The protagonists switch from the kissing couple in a sports hut and the Tinta hut honking on the cell phone between the hills to pin-up girls wallowing between mighty mushroom houses.

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They are like scenes from a derailed folk tale with claustrophobically compressed theater props. Dark dreams of paradise are astutely conveyed through Abelli Elander’s disarming logic and aesthetic. Family fantasies in which flexible mountain firs loom behind the baby with a pacifier. Dreams, longing, happiness and betrayal in treacherously composed tableaus.

With Amanda Hellsten is the self-image much more direct. In the newly opened Galerie Lundberg-Sandhagen, also in a small room half a flight of stairs up, she paints herself sitting in the subway, lying dejected in a hospital bed or celebrating in front of the dressing table.

But what looks like a direct transfer of mobile images to painting is probably not quite as simple as it first seems. In one painting she painted half over two people at an opening. As if her presence lingers in the room. And she stands alone next to it.

Overall, Hellsten reproduces the board game with nervous vital energy and has a fine sense of pattern and detail. She refurnishes her picture rooms with wedge cutouts, a bit like Japanese woodcuts, modernized. With a liberating naivety, she accurately describes the adversities of everyday life.

One was an experienced artist, the other a relatively recent graduate who combined their painterly movements with a genuine joy of storytelling. It’s nice that exciting things are happening next to the larger galleries.

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