I Dreamt I Was the Ground: Evelina Hägglund

I keep singing the title of this exhibition in my head as if it were the Les Miserable song, I dreamed a dream.

Like the musical, there are obstacles (interesting and beautiful obstacles) to be overcome in this room, obstacles of an aesthetic and emotional kind, the works twist and turn both literally and figuratively.

Imagine something being uprooted, in the sense of being pulled up and displaced, or merely placed somewhere new. The works in Hägglund’s exhibition are excavations from the ground and from the mind. There are portraits, both sculpted and painted and there are abstract drawings and objects. These are the stone-cold facts, the sort of shopping list-form of an exhibition description. Oh, how language can feel lifeless and inadequate! The numbness of it.

The reinforcing bars in the free-standing sculptures were scavenged from a building site near Hägglund’s studio. They were quite useless as the building they were supposed to reinforce had been torn down. They now live a new life, a repurposed life, a useful life. This can also be said of the portraits. Once they were something (or someone) and now in this new setting, they are something else, perhaps shedding notions of likeness to real people, breaking free, becoming instead You, Before Your Name. Is the whole exhibition a development of forms morphing from the simplest line into figurative sculpture and painted portraits? Or in reverse? We have the mimetic history of portraits and we have the abstraction, the liberation of form and “skill”. We walk along a path with things appearing to be highly articulate and non-verbal simultaneously. Hägglund is interested in language, and silence can be as much of a tangible force as a loudness. She gathers the metal into unruly bouquets and they look like captured modernist tumble weed. They get to rest here for a while within this motley crew of works.

Maybe Hägglund wants to make shadowless figures. The impossibility of such an ambition is inspiring. To be able to plop something down on a surface or floor and this something not being tinged by the idea of the damn Plato cave allegory, or by gravity or by being like something else. But we can’t see things for the first time anymore (when could we?). The works in this exhibition is no exception, we will do our best to compare it and to weigh it against something else, sometimes even making it be about us. Because we don’t want to be lost and I find that heart-breaking, how we need reassurance that our own understandings are valid, to not expose ourselves. Abstraction does not mean something devoid of meaning nor is it something un-readable. The meaning however is anyone’s guess. An abstract work of art depicts a situation as much as any other man-made object or song or dance. The sculptures depict unique scenarios and their own small tableaus, we can leave it at that.

The confrontational aspects of the pin works are somehow related to the very frontal portraits. It is an intimate gesture, to look into the eyes of someone. The pins are something else, they are sharp and only if we are situated directly in front of them will they be distinct, as soon as we move only the slightest, they shapeshift and become like the smudged drawings that are also included in the exhibition. It can drive you mad, connecting the dots. What is it all about? That the seemingly abstract works are just as figurative as the portraits? Or is it the other way around? The portraits are as abstract as the lines and metal pieces, for they are all in their core just specks of dust or atoms in this universe. The portraits look up or look straight ahead. One ceramic head is punctured by small holes. The funny thing is, the negative space, the clay that is missing, is as much materia as the remaining object, the holes are solid shapes.

This group of works do something together as an ensemble, as one gang. What happens when everything exists at the same time, in the same space. The unknown people in the paintings watch, the frail yet sturdy objects stand, the larger works with pins protrude the room, they are somehow both bound to the tradition of painting yet so very near a different expanse. The clay heads look up towards the sky, or act as signifiers in relation to the works on canvas. The drawings with seemingly dissolved letters also refuse to talk, maybe they once did, in a language long forgotten.

- Sara Walker, Curator and director at The Swedish Association for Art (Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening)

https://www.evelinahagglund.net/