Cecilia Hillström Gallery, 2023

The Living Room – Lovisa Ringborgs  fifth exhibition at the gallery. The new project features photography and sculpture, centering around an interior setting where reddish-pink tones bring the works together. In the photographic work, Ringborg has combined daylight and infrared light, which captures the presence of heat as well as visible light.

In previous works, Ringborg has used nature as a means of reflecting on a state of mind, a projection surface for inner thoughts, ideas and emotions. Depictions of landscapes with neat gardens contrast overhanging wild nature growing beyond the property lines – the safe and familiar vis-à-vis the hidden and unknown. In this exhibition, however, Ringborg focuses on an interior setting overlooking an unadorned room. Small aspects suggest life – the unmade bed, the textiles over the chair and the warm lights glowing. We do not see beyond the interior or what is out there – we only experience the room. Small shifts occur image by image. Isolated snapshots from a distant memory keep transforming detail by detail. The room becomes both a safe space as well as closed and claustrophobic, void of impressions from the outside.

In the sculptural work of a sleeping boy on a bed, the terracotta hues of clay offer a more earthy and flesh-like appearance. The sheets on the bed transform into shed skin, a possibility for change and metamorphoses.

The smaller works of still life accompany the larger photographs of the room and windows. The texture of memory is present in many of the works in the show. Pressed and dried flowers are placed side by side with bottles filled with warm water radiating heat at different temperatures – small clues relating to the room or a specific event that took place there, like fragments of a memory. The bottles with connotations of apothecary or medical use indicate some sort of measuring – of different states, where something begins and ends. Nature is present in the show in one of the photographs – an unattended and wild landscape where lupine flowers grow at the roadside. It seems to be more of a vague memory of a summer night, both inviting and nostalgic but also ominous and ghostly, rather than an actual outlook from the room. 

There is always a heightened tension present in the works by Lovisa Ringborg. Whether be it an enhanced reality, a dream state or a secluded room in one’s subconsciousness, Ringborg brings forth a convincing new project filled with the possibilities of seduction, tenderness and something uncanny, hard to grasp.