Birgitta Burling – Liikutukisa/Ecstatic

Hudikvallsgatan 6
Stockholm, Sweden

Opening hours:⁠
Wed–Fri 12–6 PM ⁠
Sat 12–4 PM ⁠
Mon–Sun Closed

The reflections of sunlight on the river on a June day. The explosive blue-turquoise green of the northern boreal forests and the play of living water form the starting point of Birgitta Burling's abstract painting.

The works function as afterimages – sensations of what our minds bring together into a poetic whole. What the viewer encounters in Burling's canvases are fragments of cosmic energy in its shifting materializations. A sudden insight, both physical and emotional, of being in the midst of this – that is liikutuksia, which roughly translates to ecstasy in Meänkieli, the language latent in the Torne Valley regions where Birgitta Burling has her roots.

Burling grew up in Morjärv, Norrbotten in 1950, at the upper bend of the Kalix River – one of the last rivers still flowing freely. The harsh whiteness of the polar winters has made people here particularly attuned to the shifts of nature. Rooted in Tornedalen and the Arctic experience, she develops a painting where intuition and gesture carry something larger than the motif itself: a sense of simultaneity between the human, nature and the cosmic flow.

Her painting engages in a natural dialogue with the great names of abstract expressionism – Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner – while bearing a distinctly Nordic sensibility for landscape, light and material experience. Here the viewer encounters not depictions of nature, but sensations – movements of water, shifts in snow-light, vibrations of color and memory.

Firestorm Foundation annually presents a female or non-binary artist whose practice deserves greater visibility and institutional recognition. This year's exhibition is a statement on the continued significance of painting and of the artistic practice that drives abstract art forward with integrity and vision. The exhibition is curated by Paulina Sokolow.