Matts Leiderstam - Panels: Stockholm

We are pleased to announce Panels, Matts Leiderstam’s sixth solo-exhibition at the gallery. The opening takes place on Thursday November 22 between 5-8 pm at our temporary space at Artillerigatan 40.

Panels refers to a project started in 2016 when Leiderstam installed 4 thin shelves around the walls of his studio and then started to make work specifically for these shelves. The aim was to approach the idea and practice of the grid, to explore its influence within abstract painting and its role in our culture so dominated by screens.

The project is on-going, the paintings are made on poplar wood and can be presented in various ways and different combinations: on shelves, in drawers, hanging on the wall or even standing on a flat surface like a table. They vary in size, from icon-format to larger works more similar to the screens new technology has provided us with.

Leiderstam has since his early career in the late 1980s worked primarily with painting, often based on photographic sources. During the first half of the 1990s his work took a political turn, for instance in his work The Shepherds, and his field of interest was expanded to the landscape – the park as a gay cruising area. This parallel perspective was later transposed to art-history and more specifically to the physical space of the museum.

By the use of multiple forms of interpretation as well as the relationship between original and copy as method, for instance in the extensive exhibition project Grand Tour, he was able to challenge the patriarchal gaze that has characterized art-history. Since the mid 00s, when he completed his PhD, he has been working primarily with photography, installation and text in relation to landscape and portraiture as genres, all the while with painting and the gaze as an underlying theme.

It is in this context Panels enters the artist’s œuvre. The works ask the questions that have always been at the core of his practice – what do paintings do and how do we look at them? When brought together in the exhibition space the works collectively form an image archive, one where the different elements are interchangeable. As the panels are not hung but rather situated in the space they are not merely paintings or objects, they are also manifestations of potential impressions of images – they exist not only in relation to the grid but within the rich history of painting and its multiple meanings.

Matts Leiderstam (born 1956) lives and works in Stockholm and Malmö. He has an international career and his work is to be found in private and public collections around the world. Larger presentations in recent years include the 8th Berlin Biennale, Collectors’ Space Istanbul, 11th Shanghai Biennale, The National Gallery of Prague, Fondazione Prada Milano, Tensta Konsthall as well as Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Oslo and Magasin III Stockholm.