Sabine Mirlesse - Instruments: Stockholm

Following her 2024 debut at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Paris, Franco-American artist Sabine Mirlesse has conceived a new body of work specifically for the Stockholm gallery and its surrounding archipelago landscape. The sculptures presented in Instruments were inspired by research Mirlesse conducted in Stockholm, notably through the SMHI (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute) and in the archeological collections at the Historiska Museet. An off-site installation in the Baltic Sea will inaugurate the exhibition and act as its conceptual centerpiece, inviting viewers to consider tools designed to interact with and decipher the natural world as functional, aesthetic and spiritual objects. 

Inspired by a 250-year-old history of measuring sea-levels, Ode to Measurement, 2025, comprises two cast-bronze sculptures placed in the waters just near the mareograph’s activity at Skeppsholmen. Rising gracefully from the sea, at four meters tall, an elongated diamond enclosure atop a long pole demarcated with horizontal notches recalls mysterious tools found in the tombs of Norse women described as “seers”, whose precise function is unknown. Adjacent, and floating on the water, a flat arc comprising divaricating lines refers to pre-compass instruments used by 11th century navigators to measure latitude and wind from their ships. For more than two months, Ode to Measurement will punctuate Stockholm’s natural landscape and honor the site where sea level has been steadily recorded longer than anywhere else on earth. In return, nature will likewise leave her mark on Mirlesse’s sculpture. Over time, water, air and salt will slowly weather the bronze patina. 

The eleven works presented in the gallery are similarly based on tools whose enigmatic forms imply functionality even as they approach abstraction. Wind Vane no. 2, 2025 is a smaller silhouetted arc reminiscent of the vane floating nearby in the Baltic Sea. Mounted on the gallery wall and made to pivot laterally, this bronze begins to look more like a Frank Stella “Protractor” than a measuring tool. In Mirlesse’s case, the radiating lines recall the geometry of sundials or early portolan charts. Relating to water in a different way, Elektrods no 1-9, 2025 are based on an archive of images of homemade dowsing rods, a subject the artist has previously represented in bronze. Here Mirlesse has used borosilicate glass to create linear forms that are suspended by barely visible threads dotted with small amber beads that look like frozen droplets. The transparency and implied liquidity of these materials allude to a precious natural resource that such instruments are used to find: water. In choosing a type of glass typically used to make beakers and other laboratory equipment, as well as petrified resin part of the earliest observations of electricity, Mirlesse raises questions about what makes an object a tool vs. a talisman vs. an artwork. Is it the form, the material or our relationship to the subject? 

The same question is raised by the large-format photograph Maia, 2022, which seems to survey the exhibition from a wintry other-worldly perch. The subject of the photograph is one of the seven metal archways Mirlesse installed in France’s Puy de Dôme volcano during the winter of 2022-23 (Crystalline Thresholds, 2022-2023). An ephemeral intervention in the mountain landscape was conceived for the summit’s microclimate. Through precise positioning, Mirlesse invited the wind, freezing temperatures and other atmospheric conditions to reveal layers of frost that continually changed the shape of the sculpture over the course of the winter months before eventually melting away in the spring. Similar enchanting alliances between nature, science and art abound in Instruments. In reflecting on mankind’s desire to make sense of the natural world, the artist attributes a certain poetic significance to the very act of deciphering itself.

Text by Mara Hoberman