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Exhibition / Östra Karup / September 2025Selma Sjöstedt exhibits for the first time at the gallery. In the exhibition ¡Tan duradera! she presents paintings inspired by the mountainous landscape outside Blanca in southern Spain. The works have been created using earth pigments, egg, oil, and water in a temporary studio – an abandoned building site on a muddy plateau.
¡Tan duradera!
6.9 – 4.10 2025
Sjöstedt’s paintings reach back to the energy that placed them in front of us, allowing the potential of these frozen events to work within us. Her motifs search for the force of gravity and dissolution in everyday experiences and impressions. Direct lines create speed across surfaces, boundaries and figures. The materiality of colour is a constant starting point in a restless but consistent navigation of a medium whose own physical laws challenge the idea.
“The important qualities of tempera are its thinness and leanness, its transparence, its dull mat surface, its permanence” (A Manual of Technique, V. Vytlacil and R. Davidson Turnbull, 1935). Layered painting with an underpainting in tempera, used by painters such as Titian and Rubens in the 16th and 17th centuries, was the technique that made possible the deep and vibrating pictorial space that seems to retain its unchanged brilliance through the centuries.
The exploration of these older techniques has opened pathways to new working methods and an expanded materiality in Sjöstedt’s painting. The current works are partly made in the mountainous landscape of the south of Spain outside the town of Blanca. The country’s pigments have been bound to the white-primed canvas with egg, oil, and water. A house construction that was interrupted when the structure slipped and cracked on the clay plateau became a temporary studio.
Discarded marble and abandoned building materials were used to create a functioning painting workshop out in the landscape.
Selma Sjöstedt, born 1985, lives and works in Malmö. Sjöstedt graduated from KHIO (Oslo) in 2015 and from Malmö Art Academy in 2017. She has previously shown her work at, among others, Malmö Konsthall, Lunds Konsthall, S!GNAL – centre for contemporary art, Molekyl Gallery and Staldgade 11 in Copenhagen.
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