JULIA ADELGREN

HESPERUS

8 NOVEMBER – 8 DECEMBER 2024

Welcome to Julia Adelgren’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition, Hesperus, consists of a series of new paintings. Opening reception is held on Friday 8 November between 5–7 PM, due to Gallery Weekend Stockholm.

SVENSKA

With nature as a clear source of inspiration, Julia Adelgren creates familiar yet imaginative landscapes, sometimes inhabited by anonymous figures or familiar objects. Her work balances the fantastic and idealistic with a quiet, earthy introspection. Each painting has its own unique scene, like chapters in a fairy tale or postcards from far-flung destinations. Her works reveal corners of a world that feels familiar yet unfamiliar: deep, shimmering seas, rolling horizons in dark pastels and gnarled tree trunks against a dramatic sky. They carry a sense of memories of places that never existed - a kind of strange nostalgia for something unreal.

JULIA ADELGREN, born in 1990 in Stockholm, Sweden, currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Adelgren studied at the National Academy of Art in Bergen, Norway, in 2014–2016 and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2016–2020.

Julia Adelgren's work has been shown at ADZ Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal; Mamoth, London, UK; Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Spread Museum, Entrevaux, France; Kunsthaus Essen, Germany; KIT, Düsseldorf, Germany, K21, Düsseldorf, Germany among others.

WORKS
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Text by Phin Jennings:

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,
I've found a joy that must infuse spring:
— Li Po, ‘Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon’

The world is a storm of impressions. Each time we open our eyes, we are flooded with images, objects, ideas and feelings. Our understanding of it is fragmented and chaotic. Even at its most mundane, our experience is simply too much for us to hope to translate into a cohesive image or story.

Julia Adelgren’s paintings are pockets of intelligibility within this storm. Her language is concise. A small number of motifs from her own daily flood repeatedly appear in various configurations: a butterfly, a sunflower, the silhouette of a hill.

Though they might look like a system of symbols, the artist is more interested in the role that they have to play within the painting.

She is not thinking of anyone or anywhere in particular, but simply seeing a person or a place appear. If you look for a coherently articulated set of references, you will be disappointed. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a system of ideas at play somewhere — only that it manifests itself in a less straightforward way.

Adelgren’s main goal is to achieve a certain clarity among her subjects that brings with it a feeling of directness and urgency. As she puts it, each painting should “have an eye” — it should look back at us.

Sometimes working on the same canvas over a period of years, she paints and repaints each element until this effect is achieved. When completed, Adelgren’s images almost seem to vibrate. They contain a wordless but intense sense of significance, as though the energy that went into their many unseen underlayers is somehow brought to bear on their surface. 

This exhibition takes place under the ambivalent light of the evening star. In some paintings we glimpse it, pink, purple or black, presiding over the scene below. In all of them, its presence can be felt in the parallel existence of darkness and illumination. Things and people, surrounded by inky black, glow like invisible ink under ultraviolet light.

Hesperus is another name for the celestial body that we call Venus. Visible just after sunset, Greek mythology designates Hesperus as the harbinger of the coming night, a moment of transformation followed by darkness. His half-brother, Phosphorus, was thought to be his inverse: visible at dawn, he welcomed the light of the coming day.

Unknown to the Ancient Greeks, Hesperus and Phosphorus were one and the same. Appearing to them — as to us — on either side of the night, it turns out that Venus is both the evening star and the morning star. The two half-brothers, once representatives of opposite poles, have been conjoined. They always were, in fact.

That is the star that illuminates this exhibition. It signals neither the oncoming darkness or dawn, but the opposing forces constantly at work within and around us. Revealing and concealing, clarity and chaos, moon and shadow.

Adelgren came to find the story of Hesperus through American poet Louise Glück’s poem ‘Vespers’, itself named after a liturgy of evening prayer in various Christian traditions. Here, the speaker seems to pray to a mercurial God for the consistent weather conditions necessary to grow their tomato plants, lamenting “the cold nights that come / So often here, while other regions get / Twelve weeks of summer.”

Glück’s poem is one of many pieces of writing that find their way into Adelgren’s paintings through a side door. She does not paint Glück’s despairing protagonist or her tomato plants, nor Moby Dick or the merchants from Indian Romantic poet Sarojini Naidu’s ‘In The Bazaars of Hyderabad’ — which she also read whilst creating these paintings. But they remain stored within her, inevitably seeping into the work in hidden ways.

When she paints, Adelgren comes into contact with all of this: the mundane motifs of everyday life, the texts that she reads and the story of Venus.

There is no way to draw a clear connecting line between any one of these sources and an element of a painting. This is not really a list of sources at all. It is a climate that surrounds her. Both the artist and her work are steeped in it. Here, bathed in Hesperus’ strange light, so are we.