Peter Köhler – In the Dead of Night
Dazzlingly beautiful and vaguely disturbing – is perhaps one way of describing Peter Köhler’s indescribable and monstrous imagery. There is something hallucinatory about his dark romanticism that hold our eyes in thrall from the very first glance.
Köhler is inspired by a myriad of phenomena. Top of the list is folklore, the occult and esoterica. Literary sources are also vital, including the gothic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe.
Johan Thurfjell – The Other Side
Johan Thurfjell’s art leads straight into big and small mysteries, oscillating between extremes such as dream and waking, life and death, light and darkness. It’s not about the actual opposites but the passages in between – a twilight zone where definitions fail, time is sealed in and people and spirits slip into each other’s domains.
The Other Side is an independent part of Johan Thurfjell’s trilogy on boundaries of various kinds. After opening at Fullersta Gård in spring 2025, it is now presented in a new version at the Nordic Watercolour Museum. In this installation, where the works of art interact, Thurfjell addresses his father’s illness and demise. What happens when reality is erased and memories start to fade? How do we handle the void after someone who is no longer there?
Vanessa Baird – Crabbed
Vanessa Baird is a key figure in Nordic contemporary art. She has also won international acclaim for her singular, picture book-inspired imagery and bold narrative style. The personal is always political in her works. Baird alternates deftly between monumental and intimate, between traditional and avant-garde. Her detailed, bright works on paper are underpinned by a surrealism that employs exaggeration and shock effects.
For many years, Vanessa Baird has excelled in a kind of kitchen-sink realism, with de-romanticised renderings of everyday life from a feminist perspective. Her drastic scenes are often literally and symbolically set in claustrophobically diminutive spaces, where the unglamorous sides of motherhood and ageing are portrayed with dark humour and frenzy.
