Stones Have Long Threads
Carin Ellberg at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
February 25 – April 10, 2021

Andréhn-Schiptjenko is pleased to present Carin Ellberg’s solo exhibition Stones Have Long Threads. The exhibition runs until April 10.

Even though Carin Ellberg’s art may show elements of different movements in art history, her peculiar work is uniquely her own style. Like so many other female artists before her, private life was early reflected in her work; Ellberg has become known for using simple, everyday materials such as coffee, stockings and clothes in sculptures and paintings. Since 1985, she has also worked in parallel and regularly with a series of renowned, painted self-portraits – currently 622 in number. All with similar design: bust format in three-quarter profile.

If the domestic, everyday life, expressed through unconventional materials, in the beginning was a central theme in Ellberg’s art, her work has increasingly opened up to her approach to the eternal questions and in her exhibition at the gallery Ellberg’s holistic conviction crystallizes. With nature as a starting point, more specifically the ever-changing sea landscape as a motif, Carin Ellberg visualizes a symbolic realm rather than an external landscape.

The stones in the title of the exhibition are the ancient objects that link us to the eternal and the threads connect the spiritual with the material world. In her sculptures, paintings and watercolors, a central form reappears: the oval. It alludes to the face or the mirror image where the other becomes oneself, it is the form that symbolizes that all people belong together. The symbol can also be found as spheres in pink glass at the ends of sculptures made of iron rods that float in the room like lines or wires. These hanging sculptures reflect Ellberg’s paintings and the shapes are in turn found in the watercolors, which with their semi-abstract figures repeat the theme. Read more…