STOCKHOLM.- Cecilia Hillström Gallery is presenting Sigrid Sandström’s exhibition Dry Maars as one of the inaugural exhibitions in the gallery’s new space at Hudiksvallsgatan. Sandström presents a series of new paintings. As a painter, Sigrid Sandström has continuously been exploring site as a concept as well as emotional experience. Over time, the depicted large-scale, barren and uninhabited landscapes have become more abstract. This time, a residency in the south of France is a starting point for her work. Living and working in the house of Dora Maar for a month, Sandström’s paintings emerge step by step; a process imbued by impressions of the surrounding landscape.

By coincidence, the name Maar leads us to the geological phenomenon maar, a low-relief volcanic crater caused by an explosion when water comes into contact with hot lava. They are typically filled with water, but a dry maar is a dried-up remnant of a violent event. In the exhibition, the painting Dry Maar is displayed horizontally; is it a map of an ancient disaster? Perhaps Sandström’s paintings are closely tied to the turbulent history of the earth, its millions of years of draughts, floods and geological catastrophes. On the other hand they can just as much be presages of what is to come. Sandström’s paintings carry an immediateness, creating a suspension of time. It is in this gap that we are caught off guard –uncertain of time and space – in front of her works.

Sigrid Sandström, born 1970, lives and works in Stockholm and is Professor of Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She previously lived and worked in the USA where she taught at Bard College Annandale-onHudson, NY, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and Glassell School of Art, Houston. Recent solo exhibitions include Västerås konstmuseum, Galleri Gunnar Olsson, Kulturens hus, Luleå, Inman Gallery, Houston, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles as well as several art fair presentations. In 2015, she exhibited at Cecilia Hillström Gallery and Galleri Gunnar Olsson in the show Between Us.

Cecilia Hillström is also presenting Johannes Heldén’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, Worlds. Working with a variety of media, Heldén explores subjects like ecology, evolution, sentience and artificial intelligence. Often set in a near future, his fictional worlds are created by means of images, animation, text and music, combined in site specific installations, performances and digital works. In this exhibition, Heldén continues to explore the intersection between word and image. The exhibition title Worlds refers to the narrative and logic of a near future where species are mutating or disappearing – a scenario constructed with both visual and literary means. In these complex works, Heldén makes us aware of our perception and concept of nature and the impact we have on the planet today. In the encounter between technology, nature and the manmade lies a poetic wonder of the everyday, our surroundings and how to comprehend the incomprehensible.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new collection of poems titled First Contact, which will be published by Albert Bonnier Förlag in April. The new publication takes place in the same fictional world as the works in the exhibition and is part of the same narrative, enriching each other at the same time as being separate works.

Johannes Heldén (b. 1978) is currently the IASPIS artist-in-residence at ISCP, New York (2018/19). In addition, he is part of the Desert X Biennale in Coachella Valley, CA, this spring with a special project, Encyclopedia / Desert Edition, in collaboration with Håkan Jonson. Heldén has exhibited extensively, both in Sweden and internationally, most recently at Art Lab Gnesta & Grafikens Hus, the Jewish museum C/O the Textile Museum of Sweden in Borås, RIBOCA1 (The Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art) and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Recent solo shows include A New We – Chapter 2 at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway and The Exploding Book at Konstakademien in Stockholm.

This spring, Heldén will participate in the new Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale 2019 with new works and in an exhibition at KUBE in Ålesund, Norway, titled The Edge of the Sea.