Unexpected treasures, captivating discoveries, hidden gems.

A constantly evolving exhibition featuring works by different artists. A chance to discover and explore, unfolding over the next four weeks.

First hang featured work by Lotta Antonsson, Inka & Niclas, Martin Mlecko, and Johan Österholm.

Inka (1985, Finland) & Niclas (1984, Sweden) are an artist duo who have worked together since 2007. They explore the relationship humans have with nature, working primarily with photography-based art. Their images examine the cultural perception of utopian landscapes and play with the synthesis of beauty, kitsch, and visual desire. The materiality of photography is crucial in their practice and is expressed in explicitly in the series ‘Adaptive Colorations’. Here the photograph takes on a new form, allowing us to explore not just the image but also the sculptural shape it takes. The works are displayed on custom pedestals or attached to the wall, in turn reexamining the formalities of sculpture vs photograph.

For many years now, and from various perspectives, Johan Österholm (*1983, Sweden) has focused on light, the central yet least tangible element of his chosen medium photography. Light pollution and the many effects it has on contemporary society is a key theme in his work. For ‘Moon Plates’ he covered standardised glass from an abandoned greenhouse in an emulsion of silver gelatin. The works shows the results that exposing this glass to the light of the full moon for a year has had. A poetic and laborious approach showing the impact of an ubiquitous light source whose impact might often be overlooked.

Martin Mlecko (*1951 – 2016, Germany) was an investigative artist working in a range of media who continually seeked the inherent beauty in objects. His photographic oeuvre is a collection of series without itself being serial in structure. He is both traveller and observer, sometimes also seeker, whose creative products defy relegation into the clearly defined pigeon holes of the art industry. Among his work are large-format installations and small scale documentation, both representational and abstract. His photos are put on show not so much as observations of reality. ‘Je ne sais quoi’ shows the impossibility of ultimately defining an aesthetic object in terms of language and investigates the medium of analog photography.

Based on the aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s – a time of social upheaval – Lotta Antonsson (*1963, Sweden) complements vintage photographs from her archive of fashion, erotic, and lifestyle magazines such as Twen, Das Magazin, and Playboy and printed matters with natural materials including shells, driftwood, and gemstones in her collages. She examines the historical and photographic representation and objectification of women. Antonsson recreates and reconstructs the original context, and by using the techniques of collage and montage, a personal and unique way of looking at the ephemeral nature of things emerges.

Hidden Gems will include work by Lotta Antonsson, Inka & Niclas, Gerry Johansson, Martin Mlecko, Johan Österholm, Julia Peirone, Lisa Röing Baer, Stefanie Schweiger, Sascha Weidner and …

The second hang features work by Gerry Johansson, Martin Mlecko, Julia Peirone, Lisa Röing Baer, Stefanie Schweiger, and Sascha Weidner.

In his grayscale photographs, Gerry Johansson (*1945, Sweden) visualizes an – often understood as an abstract or elusive concept – culture. For decades the artist has traveled to countless places all over the world, some relatively close to his native Sweden others as far away as the Mongolian city of Ulan Bator or Pontiac in the Midwestern USA. His independent visual language is the central thread that connects the places aesthetically with each other.

Julia Peirone (*1973, Argentina) explores issues of identity and the concept of gender in her photographic and film work. Her visual world is populated with girls and young women. The works from the series, blind seek min kind, Swedish for Blind caress my cheek, were made early in her career. Feeling lonely and frustrated in her adopted homeland of Sweden, Peirone began drawing the white outline of a girl on her photographs. She enjoyed the sense of power she felt after changing the already existing compositions. The girl became her alter ego, with an open invitation for others to also identify with her. The figure helped, stalked, was seen and forgotten, without limits, she explored different roles and environments.

Lisa Röing Baer (*1994, Sweden) is a recent graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently based in Berlin. Working foremost in the medium of photography, she engages with questions of power and participation. She continuously grows her personal archive of analog photographs, from which she draws inspiration for her own work. Oftentimes, other materials are combined with her photographs creating multi-layered works.

Stefanie Schweiger (*1979, Germany) moves between Asia and Europe for her photographic projects. For her photobook ‘The Magic of YUANFEN – Searching for Masters of Healing and Ancient Chinese Wisdom’, Schweiger, together with Phoebe Hui, traveled to China and Tibet. The project lays out a nuanced panorama of diverse beliefs, much of which is virtually unknown in the West. The image included in Hidden Gems show two Tibetan ngakpas, dancing during Tibetan New Year, for good luck to the world.

As a photographer, Sascha Weidner’s (*1974 – 2015, Germany) work deals with the creation of a radical subjective pictorial world. His works are characterized by perceptions, aspirations and illuminate the world of the subconscious. The artist transforms visible reality into codes, into encrypted pictures. Depending on how he arranges them and the contexts into which he places them, new narratives are created. Weidners work deals with the ”search of a refuge, where utopia orchestrates reality and vice-versa”.