Leif Engström

”By doing something a half centimetre high, you are more likely to get a sense of the universe than if you try to do the whole sky”  
— Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966)

There are several ways of seeing. We scout, we squint, we focus, we read up close, and we scan. These days, our visual spectrum is mostly dominated by the distance between the retina and a screen. As a result of this, you may experience an initial sense of disorientation and visual fatigue when viewing up close. Let that feeling linger for a while. At this moment, you’ll be somewhere between your own habitual mode of seeing and an entirely different kind of viewing. It’s time to recalibrate. In this exhibition, your visual impressions will need to be processed by another, more active part of your mind.

The group exhibition UPCLOSE presents 76 works which have all been executed in a small scale. The participating artists are some of the most well-known and loved representatives of their respective eras or generations. Some of them will be familiar from past exhibitions at CFHILL, and other’s won’t. The common denominator is how they, within the limitations of this small scale, are able to evoke a highly concentrated intensity and monumentality. This is a technique that artists have kept returning to throughout the ages. Sometimes, they’ve done so out of pure necessity, as they have had insufficient space for or access to larger canvases, but equally often, these works have resulted from curiosity and experimentation. The objects themselves are the kinds of things one will often find among more experienced collectors’ secret favourites. You know, the pieces that end up in more intimate parts of the home, like on a bedside table, or hidden away in the corner of a big living room or child’s bedroom. It’s as though the owner wanted to indicate that this work wants to be discovered, rather than dutifully meet the visitor immediately. You’ll simply have to pay attention, activate your vision, and get in UPCLOSE.

In our first micro salon we are proud to present artists from the greater CFHILL family as well as friends invited from near and afar. The full list of artists is long but worth the read: Martina Müntzing, Fredrik Söderberg, Meta Isæus-Berlin, Christine Ödlund, Anders Krisár, Jim Thorell, Daisy Parris, Justin Adian, Leif Engström, David Surman, Tim Garwood, Tomas Lundgren, Constance Tenvik, Alicia Gibson, Martin Bogren, Isak Hall, Norberg & Sundén, Ester Eriksson, Vinicius dos Santos, Lisa Horn, Edin Zenun & Maria Kulikovska.

The exhibition also include an exceptional group of artworks by Juan Tessi, Barbro Östlihn, Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Matt Leines, Wes Lang, Sigrid Sandström, Cecilia Edefalk, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Denise Grünstein, Joseph Beuys & Ivan Agueli.

CFHILL