Our selected picks of what to catch from the many listings and highlights during this week’s return of Stockholm Art Week.
Olof Marsja, A Gathering of Watchers, Seers and Geists Discussing the Probability of Them Experiencing True Light, Public, exhibition & Oliver Sundqvist, Salad Days, exhibition, Public Service
Storgatan 1, May 8 – June 5, 2025
Since Olof Marsja was awarded the prestigious Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant in 2019, Marsja has come to be known as a sculptor with a material and aesthetic style that is distinctly his own. His solo exhibition at Public Service, however, is his first gallery solo exhibition in Stockholm in years. His nifty anthropomorphic sculptures, at times, allude to his Sami background and show various materials joined together while evidencing his superb crafty hand. His new sculptures will strike with familiar note at the gallery, but the mood appears grittier and eerier. Erected and pointing finger-like elements on displays with a shamanistic air could be thought of as calling for attention or as the bearer of cautionary messages. For some, the exhibition will appear wildly and wickedly humorous, for others more unsettling but nevertheless potent and impactful. Humour runs as the common denominator between Olof Marsja’s exhibition and the second solo exhibition at the Vault Space of the gallery by Oliver Sundqvist. His work exists in a more blatantly and intentionally juvenile realm, of playing with retro colour aesthetics, childhood iconography, pop culture, and blow-up proportions, Claes Oldenburg-style. “Salad Days looks back at a time when everything felt loud, bright, and mostly without consequence. The colors are cranked up like cartoon logic; too sweet, too fast, too much. Just like the memories”, shares the artist about what can be expected at a visit.
Ayan Farah, How to Watch the Sky, exhibition, Galerie Nordenhake
Lützengatan 1, May 17 – June 19, 2025,
As Ayan Farah is set to open her second exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, thoughts shoot instantly to a moment in time, some now more than 10 years ago, when the local art scene had yet to properly catch up with the meteoric rise of this Swedish artist on the international arena. In fact, at a time when international art had its compass needle sharply pointed on abstract painting and art, Farah appeared among the few women, if not the only, next to a boys’ club of abstract artists. The writer of this text remembers seeing her work at the then seminal gallery The Hole in NYC in 2014, not even connecting in the slightest that Farah was a fellow Swede. It might be explained by her having had her big breakthrough while still based in London in connection with her studies at the Royal College of Art. Since relocating back to Sweden a few years ago, she is enjoying her well-earned due between being honored with the 2023 Sven Harrys Art Award and showing recently at Liljevalchs Konsthall in the noted exhibition “Stockholm Cosmology”. Looking back, her artistic practice has often over the years been seated in the intersection where abstract painting and textile meet. Textiles that bear the imprint of time and affection value per geographic and domestic origin are collected and become a starting point for a time-consuming and inventive “alchemical” process. In this process, light, time, chance, and earthly materials such as mud and sand are used in the midst to dye the textiles in what, at her command, become delicate and alluring abstract works, where you could say painting happens without any use of paint. “I’m guided as much by intuition as by research”, says the artist, adding further, “How to Watch the Sky traces a poetic engagement with time, ecology, and material memory, and is a meditation of slowness and regeneration”. Her solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake will feature hand-sewn embroideries of weeds and flowers emerging in her work for the first time, presenting a new leap forward.
Mark Frygell, Mutations, exhibition collaboration with clothing brand A Day’s March and Mack Art Foundation, New York
A Day’s March, Kungsgatan 3, May 13-18, 2025
Mark Frygell is one of the most singular painters in Swedish art and has been for years now, although for some, he might still be one to discover. Represented by Andrehn-Schiptjenko, he is such an artist working with a highly prestigious gallery who still gets away with exuding some sense of an underground artist and outsider art clout. Perhaps it makes sense given his background in alternative music, with early years in art spent designing album covers and working as a tattooist (Frygell is hands-on responsible for this writer’s first tattoo with an original drawing). His closest kin may well at times have appeared to be artists such as Philip Guston and Carroll Dunham, but Frygell’s aesthetics and body of work at second glance inform a great breadth. On the one hand, there might at times be a humorous head-on graphic collision between beauty and the grotesque and the absurd, and other times his hand shows more “demure” depictions of landscapes and still lifes, seemingly alluding back to art history. Frygell recently spent time as a resident at the Mark Art Foundation in Brooklyn, a stint that appears to have been the seed to his in-store collaboration with A Day’s March on the occasion of Stockholm Art Week. The clothing brand, which is known for its quiet elegance and sober Scandi cuts, has, for this collaboration, given Frygell carte blanche to paint on all 30 items of its current collection as “a canvas” in what becomes an art capsule collection and an exhibition titled “Mutations”. Frygell, not being the most obvious choice for the brand, makes this collaboration all the more exciting. While it could be contextualized with big words about blurring the lines between function and art, or a scrutiny of value schemes, we are simply going to choose to leave it at saying it’s fun when unexpected meetings like this happen between great makers and creatives.
Mandy El-Sayegh with Alice Walter, XXX KISS CROSS KILL, exhibition, Kummelholmen
Tie-in performance and artist talk event part of the exhibition for Stockholm Art Week: A Day at Kummelholmen #5: 5-7 PM, May 14
Vårholmsbackarna 120, May 10 – June 15, 2025
Kummelholmen originated as a post-industrial power plant in the suburb of Vårberg, in the south of Stockholm, which has assumed a new identity over the years as an arts venue. Truly unique in its architecture and setting itself apart from other venues, Kummelholmen is now back in full swing after a few years’ hiatus and silence. Over this past spring, the one-day exhibition series “A Day at Kummelholmen”, hosted on Saturdays, has been garnering attention with artists such as Bella Rune, David von Bahr, and Anna Nyberg, together with Kummelholmen inviting the audience to experience site-specific interventions. Scheduled to impress, the first full-on exhibition out of the gate since Kummelholmen’s return is one with the interdisciplinary London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh. Marking also her first time exhibiting in Sweden, it should be noted that El-Sayegh is represented by internationally reputable galleries such as Thaddaeus Ropac and Lehmann Maupin, and has had an impressive trajectory to date. This scheduling choice by Kummelholmen feels forward-thinking and is a healthy and very welcome contribution to this spring’s art calendar, and an antidote to the local art scene’s tendency to routinely repeat itself like a “Groundhog Day”. The immersive exhibition joins El-Sayegh’s layered paintings in the expanded field with video works and moving imagery by the fellow London-based artist Alice Walter. The eye-catching and intense title, XXX KISS CROSS KILL, might give you a hint at what themes and moods will be dispensed through the displays. El-Sayegh’s paintings in various ways incorporate images of violence, to which she, just like many of us, has been the recipient through image consumption in this digital age. The subjects of the violence are individuals who at once lack representation and agency but paradoxically also are overexposed and exploited before the eyes of the public. On the occasion of Stockholm Art Week, El-Sayegh and Walter will present a performance as part of their exhibition and for the event “A Day at Kummleholmen #5” on Saturday, May 14. The performance is scheduled alongside an artist talk led by the curator and theorist Renan Laru-an, a former artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin.
Words by art editor Ashik Zaman.
Special thanks to Stockholm Art Week.
Art Credits:
1&2) Olof Marsja, A Gathering of Watchers, Seers and Geists Discussing the Probability of Them Experiencing True Light 2025, images by Public Service Gallery.
3&4) Oliver Sundqvist, Salad Days 2025, images by Public Service Gallery.
5&6) Ayan Farah, How to Watch the Sky 2025, images by Galerie Nordenhake.
7&8) Mark Frygell, Mutations, exhibition collaboration with clothing brand A Day’s March and Mack Art Foundation 2025, images by A Day’s March.
9&11) Mandy El-Sayegh, Burning-Square-study 2024 and Net-Grid-(Blessing), 2023, images by Thaddaeus Ropac.
10) Mandy El-Sayegh with Alice Walter, XXX KISS CROSS KILL 2025, image by Kummelholmen.