SPELLBOUND

Firestorm Foundation presents SPELLBOUND, a new exhibition curated by Jennifer Higgie. Drawn entirely from the Firestorm Foundation Collection, the exhibition brings together historic and contemporary works by women and non-binary artists. SPELLBOUND explores shared artistic concerns around myth, material, the body, and the imagination.

About the exhibition

Taking the word spellbound as its starting point – the sense of being captivated, enthralled, or transfixed by an object, a story, a person, an animal, or a state of mind – the exhibition presents a rich cross-section of historic and contemporary artworks. Across sculpture, painting, and photography, the works pivot around the mysteries and myths that pulse beneath everyday life. Fantastical landscapes, plants, animals, and human figures recur throughout the exhibition, explored as sites and containers that are at once enchanted and haunted, symbolic and enigmatic.

SPELLBOUND highlights the inventiveness of a multi-generational and international group of artists who engage deeply with the alchemical potential of materials. Across different periods and practices, these works seek to reveal something of the innate enigma of human existence – inviting intuitive connections across time, matter, and imagination.

The exhibition brings together approximately fifty artworks, ranging from the alchemical and spiritualist imagery of Hilma af Klint and Tyra Kleen, to enigmatic portraits by Surrealist artists including Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Marisol Escobar, and Dorothea Tanning. The uncanny charge of the everyday appears in works by Ann Böttcher, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Barbro Östlihn, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, while intersections of nature, myth, and imagination animate the works of Hanna Hansdotter, Rithika Merchant, and Christine Ödlund. Animals and humans, fairy tales and dreams converge in playful bronze, glass, and stoneware sculptures by Paloma Varga Weisz, Ester Eriksson, and Klara Kristalova, while the expressive and political possibilities of the human body are explored in works by Charlotte Gyllenhammar and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Participating artists

Kinga Bartis, Louise Bourgeois, Ann Böttcher, Ithell Colquhoun, Marisol Escobar, Ester Eriksson, Leonor Fini, Anna Güntner, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Hanna Hansdotter, Katrine Helmersson, Anna Kristine Hvid Petersen, Meta Isaeus-Berlin, Emma Jönsson, Eva Klasson, Tyra Kleen, Hilma af Klint, Klara Kristalova, Barbara Kruger, Lotte Laserstein, Colette Lumiere, Rithika Merchant, Sabine Mirlesse, Martina Müntzing, Anna Petrus, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cindy Sherman, Dorothea Tanning, Uman, Liselotte Watkins, Paloma Varga Weisz, Sara-Vide Ericson, Ambera Wellmann, Ulla Wiggen, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Christine Ödlund and Barbro Östlihn.

About Jennifer Higgie

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer and curator based in London. She is a former editor of frieze magazine and the creator and presenter of Bow Down, a podcast dedicated to women in art history. Higgie is the author of several influential books, including The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution & Resistance, 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (2021) and The Other Side: Women, Art and the Spirit World(2023), as well as the novel Bedlam, inspired by the nineteenth-century painter Richard Dadd.

Her work moves fluidly between art history, fiction, and criticism, with a sustained focus on overlooked narratives, spiritual traditions, and alternative ways of seeing. Higgie has served as a judge for major awards including the Turner Prize, the Paul Hamlyn Award, and the John Moores Painting Prize. She also writes screenplays, and her paintings are held in collections in Australia.