Worshipping The Sun | 3 Swedish Contemporary Artists

“Worshipping the Sun” is the first exhibition of Swedish contemporary art ever shown in Israel.  Lars Tunbjörk will present part of his critically acclaimed photographic series “Winter”; Jesper Waldersten a world of drawings and Christine Ödlund the video installation “Fungus & Bacteria” and a number of drawings.
In Sweden during the deepest winter months there are only a few hours of light each day. This is the time when Lars Tunbjörk traveled around Sweden in an attempt to capture the atmosphere of the winter months for people living in Scandinavia. The project started as a means of surviving the dark part of the year. “I often feel beside myself in the winter time, and I try to go to warmer and lighter places. But the last couple of years I have traveled into the winter and darkness instead. Into areas, conditions and encounters in which I don’t really know where the outer and inner begins. And even less where it ends”.

Lars Tunbjörk has for almost 20 years been a celebrated photographer who sets new standards for photography. His work is characterized by understated humour and often absurd subject matters. He lets one see the people in the real and everyday Sweden far from Stockholm and the image of the country praised for its system of social protection. Tunbjörk has for years put forward the ugly, the unseen and the small of everyday life with the help of the flash. His method is to make the everyday appear strange, to see that which is around the corner as if it was from another world.

Jesper Waldersten reacts upon the contradictions and paradoxes our lives are full off. The figures that Waldersten creates are part of his world, where nothing is obvious and where imagination is let loose. Typical for his direct drawings is a dark sense of humour and that they often include one-liners. In his works, often made by simple lines Waldersten manages to create works full of dept where the figures are unpredictable, critical and have something to say. In “Worshipping the Sun” the works, of different sizes, painted and drawn on old paper, books and wood, of faces and figures meeting the viewer have the feeling of both Scandinavian darkness and humour, not always seen on the surface but always present. Like a family tree where everyone is present both the generations already gone and those members just recently drawn.

Christine Ödlund is an artist and composer who works with different art forms like video, drawing and music. The large video installation Fungus & Bacteria that she will show at Braverman Gallery came to birth out of her fascination with biology and the lifecycle of bacteria. Ödlund has collaborated for many years with researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In this work she uses images captured with a medical microscope of fungi and bacteria. Life forms that are part of our world but we do not notice them. By experimenting with scale and colour, Ödlund creates a magical landscape on the border between fantasy and reality, science and fiction. A number of her detailed pencil drawings of fungus, plankton and other microorganisms will also be part of the exhibition.

“Worshipping the Sun”; Swedes, a secular people, are not spoiled with sun, the darkness and the lack of sunlight during the long winter months has made them into “worshippers of the sun”. Both Tunbjörk and Waldersten are exploring what happens around them. Like anthropologists they watch people and depict what they see in two very different ways. The bacteria and fungi that Ödlund examines in her own special artistic way do not need the sunlight to live but rather exist in a world where sunlight is lacking like for people during the winter months.

Curator: Sandra Weil