The pink cake will slowly decay on its pedestal. "Gerascophobia" is what pastry artist Elle Ashdari calls her work, a title borrowed from the term for extreme age phobia. The selling price of 1 billion kronor suggests that it is not for sale.
It's a game about economy, transience, and aesthetics, made with a twinkle in the eye – we won't reveal the insurance value, says art gallery director Joanna Sandell Wright, who is now hosting her second spring salon.
The cake mousse blends color-wise with Wilja Ågren Öman's queer wall hanging "Thanks and forgive, Grandma" whose text is also written in Tornedalian Finnish.
The political messages are, however, more veiled, even if the young Ukrainian artist Alexander Ravsky's giant painting "Victims of War" makes Joanna Sandell Wright associate with Picasso's anti-war painting "Guernica".
Interlude
Otherwise, textile art is given unusually large space at this year's salon, just like in the art world in general.
The textile is also international, says the art gallery director, pointing to a more Swedish example: linen napkins with embroidered interlude stains.
But on Vanja Hamdahl's suspended parachute canopy, there is instead embroidered poetry about dreams "under bomb skies" while Klara Wirsén Suchowiak has created a surrealist dollhouse where everything is flocked – clad in a velvet-like fabric.
Previously, the textile art tradition has been strong primarily on the southern hemisphere, emphasizes Joanna Sandell Wright.
- There is an art history to take support from that may be different from the Western one. But I also think it's about a contrast to mobile phones and a return to materiality.
Braided Thoughts
The turbulent world situation means that the artistic work takes more time, she believes.
It becomes almost like a ribbon where you braid in your thoughts. The hours in the studio are important.
More than a quarter of the artists have roots "in other geographies", she emphasizes. Cristian Quinteros Soto from Upplands Väsby, with parents born in Chile, has photographed himself bathing like a Zornkulla and also lets the art audience follow him on a wilderness sauna in a tent, a work that deals with both taking care of oneself and others in a time of need for care.
He makes process-based art in Stockholm's nature reserves, says the art gallery director, who will also test it during the press viewing.
Opens: February 14.
This year's salon: 177 artists have been selected from nearly 4,000 applicants. The artists are between 18 and 78 years old and live all over the country, from Brösarp to Boden.
This year's jury: Marcia Harvey Isaksson, textile artist and curator, Daniel Youssef, artist, and Sandra Weil, curator specialized in art for integration and coexistence, Joanna Sandell Wright, art gallery director and chair of the Spring Salon.
