Björkholmen Gallery

Matthias van Arkel has become known for his unique expression of merging painting and sculpture in his works made of silicone. Over the past few decades van Arkel has consequently investigated painterly ideas, his practice has emerged out of a conceptual approach. In his three-dimensional works meaning is achieved through density, sensuality and energy. There is a performative dimension involved in the creation process, as the artist balances intuition versus control through the special technique that he has developed. The sculptural shapes move like enlarged brush strokes forming abstract landscapes. Van Arkel challenges our perception of what defines a painting and invites us to see it from a new perspective.

Viola Florin's artistry focuses on ceramic sculptures and charcoal drawings that take shape in an abstract expression filled with light and darkness. Her works reflect an unfiltered perception of the surrounding world. Dynamic compositions in rhythmically swirling forms travel through different levels, creating depth and movement. The relationship between sculpture and drawing is close, they influence each other and become new translations in a timeless drama.

Lukas Göthman's artistry focuses on series of journeys, self experienced selected realities or made up by fiction and dreams. His works are often featured as texts; short stories, a title or a phrase repeated to create an abstract composition. Göthman investigates the visual effect of words and letters. Sentence by sentence build an intriguing visual composition set over a monocrome of colour. Curves and impressions of varying fields of depth are realised following a simple set of self imposed rules. Other series of works investigate the landscape, creating dreamlike illusions. It is the artist's very private world of thought or emotion in which viewers are immersed through the intensity of the colour scheme and expressive texts in his works.

Hans Isaksson's production is based on a multitude of methods, his utmost interest being sculpture. In other medias he has also worked with aesthetics of text in series which consist of photographs of film end notes. A common denominator for his work is its strong conceptuality that always makes the viewer to question what actually is the nature of the presented object. His fondness for creating illusions becomes apparent for example in his fruit sculptures in real scale. Because of their skilled handcraft these sculptures appear very real, but when one intends to lift up one of his banana peels from the floor it becomes obvious from the weight of the lead sculpture that one has been lured. Despite of the mysterious elegance of the piece, it cannot totally escape the association to everyday, to fruit that is to be eaten and consumed. What you see and what you make of it becomes a matter of perspective.