STOCKHOLM.- Her whole life was spent in the arts, and she was there when modern history was being written. Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss’ artistic career began in stage design but branched out in many directions. Now Moderna Museet is showing a selection of her drawings, sketches and models.

Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1928 and grew up in Vienna and Rotterdam before moving to Sweden while the Second World War raged in Europe. She studied at Tekniska skolan (now Konstfack) in Stockholm, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and the École national supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, before embarking in 1952 on a long and successful collaboration with her partner, the artist Peter Weiss. Beginning with joint film production, she moved on in 1963 to work mainly with theatre. Together, the two became international key figures, both within the new radical left and in the emerging modern theatre movement. The couple also belonged to the circle of artists and creative workers at the centre of Moderna Museet and its activities that were emerging in the early 1960s.

Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss operates in the interface between stage design and visual art – forever connected to the international scene of intellectually and politically committed workers in the arts. Her engagement in art and politics has involved her in student riots, liberation struggles and cultural centres all over the World.

Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss is primarily known as a scenographer, but this multifaceted profession has many subcategories, two of which are drawing and architectural models. While stage design as a whole is a collective process of negotiation and collaboration, the actual sketching and model-making is a private and individual creative space. This is especially poignant in the work of Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss: her drawings and models are meticulous, exuding a delight in the media, encapsulated in time, research and ideas. This exhibition presents her works in their own right, as solitaires – detached from the stage context.

Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss began as a ceramic artist but has also been a costume designer. Her work on Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade first performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, before going on to Broadway – won her a Tony Award for best costume design in 1966. The same year, she began collaborating with Ingmar Bergman on the production of Peter Weiss’ The Investigation for the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, a professional partnership that continued for decades.

In 2013, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss published her autobiography, Minnets spelplats, on Bonniers förlag. The same year, Swedish Television SVT broadcast Kvinnor som du gör en man impotent (Women like you make men impotent) – a documentary about Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss’ life in a male-dominated industry. In 2014, she did an episode of Sommar i P1 on Swedish Radio.

This is Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss’s first solo exhibition at Moderna Museet. It will be shown in the Pontus Hultén Study Gallery on Floor 2.