Market Art Fair | Pauline Fransson & Ellen Ehk: Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm

For Market Art Fair 2023, Berg Gallery will present new works by the Nybro based artists Ellen Ehk and Pauline Fransson, whose practices are tied together by their respective interest in the relationship between the body of nature and our own physical bodies.

Ellen Ehk (b. 1976) uses medium like clay, bronze, and glass to evoke natural elements, bringing an imagined organic object into the physical world. The utmost inspiration for her work is the old-growth forest in the proximity of her childhood home, which eventually was subject to a severe form of clearcutting. Deeply affected by this experience, Ehk has dedicated her artistic practice to recreating symbols of this lost place. Her interest in nature is centered around human inflict, memory, identity, and loss.

Constantly pushing boundaries and developing new methods of production, Ehk’s practice is marked by her persistent explorations of a certain material. The presentation at Market Art Fair will bring together a series of works in bronze – a medium alluding to memorial statuary. Being casted in bronze, Ehk’s carefully executed spruce trees and gently combed, ornamental branches are immortalized and assigned a monumental status.

Pauline Fransson (b. 1990) will present a new series of paintings inspired by her own immediate surroundings: the woodlands around her studio in Nybro, Småland. Identifying a kinship between nature and the sensitive, impressionable body, Fransson stresses that nature is body and body is nature. She works mainly with egg tempera and oil on canvas, and her work is underpinned by a profound interest in how fragility can be expressed through the transparency of the egg tempera and the opaque, saturated quality of the oil paint.

The title of her presentation at Market Art Fair is "snöblind", the Swedish term for an eye condition caused by intense light, such as the reflection of ultraviolet rays from a snow surface. While referring to the physical damage on the eyes, and the implications of actually becoming blind, Fransson raises questions about what it means to see and depict, about the vulnerability of vision, and how blindness can be understood as a form of seeing.

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