Carin Ellberg - Coastal settlers and species from the sea: Paris

We are proud to present Coastal settlers and species from the sea, Carin Ellberg’s first solo-exhibition in Paris, opening on Saturday November 29 2025 from 6–8pm in presence of the artist and running through January 17 2026. Carin Ellberg has been represented by Andréhn-Schiptjenko since the start of the gallery in 1991 and is a major fixture on the Swedish art scene.

 

Ellberg’s practice unfolds as an ongoing investigation into transformation and permeability — between painting and sculpture, between material and imagination, between the intimate and the cosmic. Her work persistently negotiates the boundaries that separate and connect wall and floor, the real and the represented, the self and its surroundings. Thoughts, memories and associations drift and reconfigure into new, evocative visual constellations, testifying to a process that is at once introspective and open-ended.

 

Ellberg’s latest body of work, encompassing sculpture, painting and watercolours, continues her long-standing exploration of form as both a physical manifestation and a symbolic language. In this exhibition, the sea acts as a generative metaphor: mutable, reflective, and infinite. Its presence is not only thematic but structural — a rhythm that informs the undulating lines, soft transitions, and fluid correspondences between media. The works oscillate between abstraction and figuration, between surface and depth, much like the ebb and flow of the tide itself.

 

The paintings and watercolours, with their subdued hues and translucent layering, hover between the atmospheric and the corporeal. Ellberg’s pinks and greys — colours she relates to the body as much as to light — evoke a delicate physicality, as if perception itself had taken on pigment. The watercolours, with their meandering lines, could be visual meditations on change: inner landscapes where imagination and memory flow together.

 

In her sculptural works, fragments seem to have drifted out of these pictorial spaces to claim volume in the room. Suspended forms of glass suggest organisms or constellations — shapes reminiscent of marine life or celestial diagrams — both tender and precise. Ellberg’s process is one of receptive creation, where meaning arises through encounter rather than assertion. Her oeuvre stands as a sustained meditation on continuity between inner and outer worlds, and between material and immaterial experience; where everything, ultimately, belongs together.

 

Born in Stockholm in 1959, where she continues to live and work, Carin Ellberg studied at the Royal Institute of Art and has been a vital presence on the Swedish art scene since her debut in 1989. Her work is represented in major collections including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Malmö Museum; Uppsala Konstmuseum; Borås Konstmuseum; Liechtensteinische Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Liechtenstein; Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Vestfossen, Norway; Västerås as well as in numerous public commissions.