Medley - The Tore A Jonasson collection

Dates

May 20 - September 18 2022

About participating artists

Berit Lindfeldt

Bathing and swimming are typical summer pastimes. InBerit Lindfeldt’s sculpture Swimmers from the late 1970s, five figures are swimming, floating, diving and wading. She created this piece shortly after graduating from the Valand Academy, where she had devoted a lot of time to life sculpting and human anatomy. Swimmers is made of chicken wire and paper, and the net ingeniously suggests ocean wave patterns, and the sea-green bodies under the surface evokes the memory of cool water against sun-warmed skin. Lindfeldt has pursued this exploration of simple, everyday materials in sculptures with a tangible materiality that conveys something familiar and visceral, albeit in a more abstract form.

Maurits Ylitalo

Maurits Ylitalo also engages with an aquatic setting. In his painting Heart of Darkness, he depicts two sun-drenched figures on a diving board. The style of the woman’s pink swimsuit suggests the carefree 1950s, but the murky water and titular reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel challenges and prompts us to question what we actually see. Ylitalo has always drawn and painted in a variety of media. With inspiration from disparate sources in art history, the narrative images are intuitively structured and filled with people, objects and milieus, to create captivating and evocative compositions.

Truls Melin

Truls Melin’s Troll Fisher is also out on dark waters. The boyhood fascination for building models of boats, aeroplanes and various vehicles is characteristic of Melin’s sculptures, where elements from different fields are combined in new constellations. His sculptures have an ambiguous nature. Although they show clearly what they are, they also harbour something beyond the immediately visible, an examination of what lies below the surface, in memory and the subconscious. The sea as a theme, especially its dark meaning, fascinated him. Along with boats, and later sailors, dredgers recur in his sculptures. As part of a personal rehabilitation process, they delve into the hidden depths to bring everything to the surface. The sculptures are painted in one colour, often green or blue, to create effects of shadow and light, but this also has a camouflage effect, hiding the work.

Anna Bjerger

From ocean-blue, we move on to endless green lawns in Anna Bjerger’s Golf. A solitary golf player in the upper half of the painting has just putted the ball... which might make it down the hole. The viewer is left in eternal uncertainty. Bjerger bases her works on photographs, from her private albums or other sources, such as books or magazines, but they all have the same universal quality. The motif and its potential to awaken curiosity is the focus of her selection process. With these paintings, Bjerger seeks to challenge prevailing perspectives and perceptions, but she is also fascinated by surface itself. Her works often have references to art history and to a kind of image-making that is familiar in our cultural sphere, but the subject is left open to everyone to define for themselves.

Bianca Maria Barmen

How children and young people relate to play, sports and movement is also a theme in this exhibition. In Bianca Maria Barmen’s reliefs Girl with Globe, we see a young girl triumphantly raising a ball above her head, and in Girl Carrying Balls, a girl is on her knees holding lots of balls in her arms. The reliefs are cast in both plaster and bronze, with wholly different effects – the fragile and transient white plaster against the traditional status of bronze. Solitary figures are a recurring subject in Barmen’s placid, often meditative sculptures, with inspiration from ancient Egyptian art and Japanese culture. This gives them a timeless appeal, like frozen moments.

Mette Björnberg

A young and girlish quality is also conveyed by Mette Björnberg’s Flying Beauty, a short turquoise pleated skirt in motion. This work is one of several sculpted and painted reliefs that were presented together a couple of years ago. The objects are made of lime, a wood used traditionally for carving, where the seductively smooth surface relates, more or less intimately, to the female body and female attributes. Each relief conveys its own story, like a personal and sensitively portrayed fragment from a certain period in life.

Rita Lundqvist

Three Boys alertly meet our gaze in Rita Lundqvist’s painting. The composition is characteristically straight-forward, and the uniformly-dressed boys are facing the viewer against a similarly uniform background in an unidentifiable landscape. Or maybe it’s a ball park of some kind, where their attention is aimed at something going on outside the picture? Lundqvist builds her paintings slowly, with meticulous brush strokes. They are populated with occasional figures, boys or girls, in scenes that can seem both enigmatic and subtly humorous. What stories the pictures tell is left to the viewer’s imagination.

Julia Peirone

The gaze of others, identity and ideals are manifested in Julia Peirone’s two photographs from the series Bump, set, hit and spike. Peirone has been widely acknowledged for her portraits of teenage girls, taken in split seconds when they don’t have control of their looks. Lotta and Norma were also shot in a moment in between, in the act of getting up from the ground after falling, or possibly after a break. The young girls are in that sensitive borderland between childhood and adulthood. They are dressed in sports clothes, but are nevertheless impeccably made up, with eyeshadow, blusher and lip gloss. They gaze inwards and for a moment maybe forget the world’s and their own expectations.

Catti Brandelius

A comment on the body norms in elite gymnastics and elsewhere is also delivered by Catti Brandelius. Her artistic practice includes performance, and she has created several alter egos relating to different periods in her life and highlighting various social phenomena. The Elite Acrobat emerged from a personal crisis. Her desire to break away from the boredom of everyday life and transform her body prompted her to write the Elite Acrobat Manifesto. It stipulates that the elite acrobat, against all odds, shall defy the laws of gravity, do a handspring and perform a gymnastic routine inspired by the elite gymnast Nadja Comăneci. The piece was presented as a performance work and also resulted in a film where she comments on the quest for the ideal body with humour and self-irony. The three gym suits are also food for thought. The artist, who is 154 cm tall, still had to buy a costume in size XL. So, in addition to making one for herself she also made one each for the world’s shortest and the world’s tallest women.

The exhibition title

The exhibition title highlights the eclectic nature of the collection, where the common trait, in one way or another, is sports and athletics. As if by chance, several of the activities that appear in the works are featured in international sports events taking place during the exhibition period, for instance the World Aquatic, Athletic and Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships between May and September. Both artists and athletes face a number of challenges relating to accomplishment and issues of identity and self-image. Art and sports are social phenomena that influence individuals and society on many levels. In the spirit of Tore, we hope the new works in his collection will trigger many thoughts and reflections.