Night Descend

Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s extraordinary art moves with a compelling force. There is a vibrant tension in the artist’s work that touches on a motif of doom, but also harbours questions about connections, history, power, memories and the possibilities for analysis and decisions. Her breakthrough came in 1993 with the monumental public installation Dö för dig (Die for you) – a 120-year-old oak tree suspended upside down, hovering over the crowded Drottninggatan, in the heart of Stockholm.

This breakthrough work, which probably contributed to Gyllenhammar being appointed professor at the Malmö Art Academy in 1995, was followed by several picture suites and installations, with perspective-reversing leitmotifs (like the vision of a woman hanging upside down, a motif repeated in the series Disobedience, 1997; Belle, 1998; Fall, 1999; Hang, 2006 and Human Load, 2014). The upside-down perspective have thus recurred in Gyllenhammar’s work several times. Questioning identity, femininity, the act of falling and an exploration of the boundaries between the external and internal are also recurring themes in her production. This aspect was particularly touched upon when Firestorm Foundation’s Night Descend was included in the exhibition Charlotte Gyllenhammar - Croiser / Korsa (12 November 2022 - 26 March 2023) at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm:

The title that Gyllenhammar has chosen for the exhibition is Croiser / Korsa. In choosing the French word Croiser, and the Swedish word Korsa, Gyllenhammar has taken hybrids, mixtures, collisions and crossings as her starting point. What happens when a perspective shifts in scale or position; as when a sculpture of a small child is portrayed as a giant, when something that is usually upright is turned upside down, or when a work originally made in bronze is re-created in a material such as plaster or jesmonite? How do these changes, intersections and displacements affect a work’s meaning, expression and the viewer’s experiences and interpretations? And what happens when one work meets another in a previously never shown compilation, and in a new context and spatiality? Charlotte Gyllenhammar repeatedly reflects on questions like these. And the titles she assigns to her works and exhibitions are just as multi-layered as her artworks.

The reversed perspective in works like Night Descend is, as mentioned, a recurring theme in Gyllenhammar’s art and a skilful stylistic device that raises questions, as well as conflicting emotions, in the viewer. Magnus Bons (born 1964, Swedish freelance art critic and editor of www.konsten.net), for example, wrote the following about Night Descend (and its counterpart Night Ascend) in his review of the exhibition Natt (Night) at Fotografiska in Stockholm, 2016:

We have met the hanging woman several times in Gyllenhammar’s work, but here she has stepped outside the photographic image. Now she takes her place in our rooms. And everything is different. She defies gravity and has conquered a greater freedom of action. She also appears divided, and each sculpture has its own movement. One is pointing downwards, while the other is rising from the floor. But perhaps their movements coincide? Everything changes depending on the viewer’s perspective. Each sculpture shows what the other hides. When we see the woman’s head as a budding flower in ‘Night Ascend’, we are reminded of how it is hidden in ‘Night Descend’. And vice versa, one woman exposes her abdomen while the other’s half of the body is still under the floor. We perceive the cycle of the sculptural couple, but only in our minds is the spatial reversal completed.

Where Bons saw a woman that ‘defies gravity’ and ‘has conquered a greater freedom of action’, however, Kristina Maria Mezei PhD (born 1953, Swedish art historian, art critic and author) was rather ‘flushed with discomfort’ by the ‘strikingly simplified sculpture Night Descend’ and its ‘cry for help’, in her review of the exhibition Kastad/Cast at Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden, 2020 (‘Upp- och nervända världar. Charlotte Gyllenhammar på Skissernas museum i Lund: Kastad/cast’, review published on www.mezei.nu, 20 December 2020):

There are a lot of things that seem to be upside down these days. In yoga, standing on one’s head is considered beneficial; I practise it with advantage in the mornings. But in front of Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s strikingly simplified sculpture Night Descend, I'm flushed with discomfort. A pair of slender legs stretch out of a bell-shaped skirt towards the sky. A cry for help, fear, protection, coercion, violence - it is easy to grope for words in the chaos of emotions hidden behind the visually simple and summarising formulation. The sculpture joins the ranks of iconic female figures that clearly carry allegorical references to freedom or justice, for example. Here, ambiguity and sliding indeterminacy are cast in carbon black bronze.

When Night, Descend was exhibited at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, Malin Hedlin Hayden (art history professor at Stockholm University) also wrote (‘The Topography of Vulnerability’, article in [Eds.] Karin Sidén & Catrin Lundeberg, Charlotte Gyllenhammar Croiser / Korsa, exhibition catalogue, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, 2022) about how the ‘evasive’ sculpture ‘in a symbolic sense’ ‘suggestively represents silence’:

Gyllenhammar’s works are often surrounded by a kind of visualised silence. I think of this silence as a visualised subject and in terms of integrity, perhaps protection too; as an indirect imperative for us to keep proper distance. Obviously, sculptures are usually silent, but here it seems to also be about something else. In 2014, Gyllenhammar made the sculptural diptych Night, Ascend and Night, Descend. The latter is undeniably figurative. It represents two legs stretching upward, toes aloft, as in a handstand. A skirt hangs from the waist. It serves as a stable base from which the figure takes its support and balance. The legs appear to be reaching upward, but this is contradicted by how the skirt falls heavily in broad folds. The work may therefore simultaneously represent a controlled body in free fall. […] The surfaces of these sculptures are finished with black pigment, which resists reflections of light (unlike, for example, bronze). I think of black holes. At a distance, these sculptures appear like two black voids with sharp outlines: like slender silhouettes, yet clearly weighed down in their solid three-dimensionality. […] Even though both Night, Ascend and Night, Descend are physically manifested objects (their dimensions and materiality, their darkness), they are - despite being figurative sculptures - evasive too. In a symbolic sense, they suggestively represent silence in terms of cancellation.

Edition of 3 + 1 artist’s proof (AP 1/1)

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Ten by Ten, 29 April - 19 May 2022.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).

Exhibitions

Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, Charlotte Gyllenhammar - Croiser / Korsa, 12 November 2022 - 26 March 2023, no.13.

Literature

(Eds.) Karin Sidén & Catrin Lundeberg, Charlotte Gyllenhammar: croiser / korsa, exhibition catalogue, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, 2022, mentioned p. 13-14 and 120-121; illustrated full page in colour, p. 43.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation