Your cart is currently empty!
22.03.04. Wetterling – Anna Pajak
Wetterling Gallery – Anna Pajak – Medusas Skratt – February 10 to March 19, 2022 – Kungsträdgården 3 – Open Tuesdag – Friday 11.00 – 5.30 pm, Saturday 1.00 – 4.00 pm
ABOUT the artist
Anna Pajak is a painter and printmaker. Her starting point is often a bodily sensation translated into the visual. In her works, she explores geometrical spaces and architectural elements such as surfaces, patterns, and depths. Pajak merges color, symbols, and perspectives into visionary imagery where the abstract meets the figurative. Drawing from modernist female painters, spiritualism, and dreams, Pajak deconstructs and recombines symbols, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge traditional contexts and interpretations. Her large-scale paintings bring a sense of another dimension to life – a reality on the border to dream and fiction. Anna Pajak, born 1992, lives and works in Stockholm. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm in 2020. Anna Pajak has been exhibited at Kunstverket Galleri, Oslo, Konsthallen Kvarnen, Dalarna, and Stene Projects, Stockholm to name a few. She has been rewarded with grants from Queen Sonja Printmaking Award (2021) and Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (2019 and 2020) among others. https://www.pajak.se/
ABOUT the exhibition
We are pleased to present Anna Pajak’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, Medusas Skratt (The Laugh of the Medusa). Besides the new series of oil paintings, several set in a monumental scale, the exhibition features glass sculptures, a new medium for Pajak. Opening Reception will take place on Thursday, February 10 from 4 – 7 pm.
With an exquisite sense of color and precise compositions, Anna Pajak creates intuitive motifs reminiscent of sacred geometry and religious icons. With a starting point in the myth of the Medusa, Anna Pajak invites us to seductive and powerful imagery filled with mysterious symbolism. When Medusa dies, the warrior Chrysaor and the winged horse Pegasus are born out of her blood when mixed with the seafoam. Medusa is murdered, but instead, two powerful creatures emerge, a metaphor Anna Pajak has been inspired by. The paintings in the exhibition are intended as Medusa’s shields. Seductive objects such as precious stones and flowers are composed together with geometric elements in a vibrant, clear color scheme. Motifs reminiscent of the unicorn Pegasus horn are found in several of the paintings but are also represented in three-dimensional form as a group of glass sculptures. Anna Pajak’s paintings vibrates as if charged with inherent energy.
Pajaks often work in dialogue with female pioneers, writers, and artists. In her first solo exhibition at Wetterling Gallery, Ghost Flowers Arrive Through Water, she invited Georgia O’Keeffe into her process; her degree exhibition from the Royal Institute of Arts took place in relation to Hilma af Klint’s work. The title of the exhibition Medusas Skratt (The Laugh of the Medusa) is borrowed from Hélène Cixou’s feminist classic from 1975.
“I read Hélène Cixous’ essay The laugh of the Medusa. I feel directly interested in how I can transfer her theory of female writing to my language of painting. The writing is cyclical and non-linear like the female body, just like painting, I think. According to Cixous, what distinguishes female writing, is that it gives expression to the body, or that the language captures what the body has experienced, just like painting. For me, a narrative emerges in parallel with the paintings, the stories can be abstract, they point to a state. There, in the painting, I get to know the characters/symbols, and in me with them, a new story is created. I have invited Medusa’s companionship to the studio and together we have let her shields grow. The snakes that form her hair must stand for her different desire, for the diversity of the woman being. There are no dichotomies, in my exhibition Medusa’s Laughter, everything must exist at the same time. I meet Medusa’s gaze in the studio, do not get petrified. In her iris shines a gradient sky, vulgarly beautiful. I see the exhibition as her return. Violent and soft at the same time.” Anna Pajak, 2022
ABOUT the gallery
Wetterling Gallery is one of the leading galleries for contemporary art in Scandinavia, exhibiting a dynamic program of both highly internationally acclaimed artists as well as young, upcoming artists from Sweden. By providing a unique and playful entrance to the art world, Wetterling Gallery stands for quality and relevance. Our goal is to make art available for a curious audience.
Founded in 1978, we consider ourselves a long-term partner for artists, collectors, institutions, and visitors. The gallery plays a significant role for the development of both the local as well as international art scene. With a history of brining international artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Frank Stella to Sweden we are today doing the reversed, presenting our Swedish artists to the international art scene. The gallery provides a platform for dialogue and meetings between different forms of artistic expression and people.
Wetterling Gallery arranges around six exhibitions annually in our main space, located in Stockholm. In 2015 we inaugurated our project space, allowing the gallery program to be more dynamic. 2020 we opened up a showroom and a lounge within the gallery where art from our collectors regularly is exhibited in a relaxed environment. Wetterling Gallery also has a showroom located in Gothenburg, where a curated selection of our collections is shown on a regular basis.
Besides the exhibitions at the gallery, we participate in art fairs around the world and produce art books and catalogs, often in conjunction to our ongoing shows. To live up to our motto to be an available gallery for a curious audience, we recently went live with an online shop where you can purchase artworks in edition.
Please note that our exhibition program is researched and developed well in advance, and we are unable to accept unsolicited approaches for meetings, exhibitions, or projects. https://www.wetterlinggallery.com/