Susanne Gottberg: By Hiding Revealed
Galerie Forsblom, January 26–February 18, 2024.
Susanne Gottberg’s paintings invite us to step into a reality of simultaneous spaces and parallel truths. The spaces she invokes can be found within the viewer and every atom around us. In an exalted register, Gottberg shows us how a painting can pose a question to which it is impossible to find an answer. Nor indeed can life be summed up in just one statement. Gottberg paints mysteries that invite us to reflect on fundamental questions of existence. Encountering her work forces us to slow down and engage in a quiet moment of meditation. Her paintings insist that we not only look but also listen, accepting that the mystery only deepens over the passage of time. The inherent paradox of her art is that it helps us to understand that there is no point in even trying to unravel the enigma.
Gottberg’s paintings possess a powerful sense of spatiality. The artist explores her subject from multiple angles and points of departure. Overlapping realities coexist in her paintings; some obscured, some reflected, some multiplied. The veiled surfaces cloak an enigma to which the viewer has no access other through their own innermost being. Gottberg conjures an illusion of deep spatiality with the aid of reflections, which seem to exist in their own separate reality. The world they inhabit appears to have lost its connection with its original time and place. Sometimes, the space is literally multiplied as a painting within a painting. Thus, the process continues its life from one work to the next: first, there is an interpretation and a reproduction, after which the subject expands and goes off in search of new paths. Finally, we arrive at a point where the process itself becomes the subject, constituting everything. The contours melt into the background, expanding and coalescing with reality. Gottberg’s paintings create spaces in which time collapses, and reality itself is densified.
Gottberg (b.1964) graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. She received the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize in 1991 and was chosen as Finland’s Young Artist of the Year in 1994. Gottberg has held numerous solo exhibitions around Europe. Her work is represented in numerous major museums, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki Art Museum HAM, Saastamoinen Foundation, the Amos Anderson Art Museum, and Trondheim Art Museum.