Gunnel Wåhlstrand @ Turku Art Museum, Finland

Gunnel Wåhlstrand 

Turku Art Museum 

Through 14 September 2025 

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND 

Photographer: Mikael Olsson 

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND 

Rose, 2020 

Ink-wash on paper, 125 x 154 cm

Private Collection

Photograph: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

Wave, 2015

Ink-wash on paper, 245 x 160 cm

Private Collection

Photograph: Per-Erik Adamsson

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

The Last Island, 2012 

Ink-wash on paper, 157 x 218 cm

Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm 

Photograph: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Gunnel Wåhlstrand, one of Sweden’s most prominent contemporary artists, is known for her large-scale ink-wash paintings that depict memories, people, and landscapes with photographic precision and poetic sensitivity. Her works are rooted in her own personal history and explore memory, the connections between past and present, and the quiet depths of human existence.

Painting with ink on large paper is a slow, meditative process that demands the utmost precision. Gunnel Wåhlstrand does not paint the darkest darks right away; instead, the lights, shadows, and subtle tones in between emerge from the interplay between the saturation of the ink, the many transparent layers, and the light-bearing space of the paper. The irreversible method allows no room for error, and being aware of these risks helps the artist maintain focus. Through patient repetition, Gunnel Wåhlstrand creates mesmerizingly beautiful worlds that convey a sense of intense presence. Gunnel Wåhlstrand can spend up to six months committed to each painting, and her production is purposefully sparse—54 works in the past 23 years. 

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

Mother Profile, 2009

Ink-wash on paper, 188,5  x 137,5 cm

Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm 

Photograph: Björn Larsson

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

White Peacock, 2007-2009

Ink-wash on paper, 109 x 160 cm 

Private Collection

Photograph: Björn Larsson

Gunnel Wåhlstrand bases her work on her personal history, photographs from her family album, and, more recently, her own snapshots of places saturated with memory. For over a decade, her art has sought to bridge the distance to her father, who took his own life when she was just one year old. His death was not talked about in the family, and even as a child, Gunnel Wåhlstrand turned to old family photographs in an attempt to understand him. The large scale of the paintings and the painstaking working method evolved from the artist’s deep need to linger in the process and immerse herself in the world of these images. Transcending time and space, her paintings interweave the gazes of different generations—gazes shaped by absence and distance. In her more recent works, the artist’s own experiences and memories of the photographed places merge with the intimate, inner world of the painted landscapes. The linear passage of time seems to shift, as if opening toward eternity.

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

Långedrag, 2004

Ink-wash on paper, 209 x 157 cm / 192 x 140 cm 

Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm 

Photograph: Björn Larsson

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

The Desk, 2004 

Ink-wash on paper, 206 x 157  cm

Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation 

Maria Bonnier Dahlins Stiftelse 

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND

By the Window, 2003

Ink-wash on paper, 151 x 198 cm

Collection Michael Storåkers 

Photograph: Björn Larsson

The artist’s first solo exhibition in Finland presents works spanning her entire career from 2002 to 2023. The works are on loan from private and public collections, including Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation, Magasin III Museum of Contemporary Art, Malmö Art Museum, the Nordic Watercolour Museum, and the Sten A. Olsson Foundation. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde and curated by Selina Kiiskinen and Kari Immonen from Turku Art Museum.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand (b. 1974, Uppsala) lives and works in Stockholm. She made her breakthrough immediately after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2003. Her recent solo exhibitions have been held at Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde (2024), Gothenburg Art Museum (2019), Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (2017), and Magasin III in Stockholm (2017).

TURKU ART MUSEUM

Aurakatu 26, 20100 Turku

turuntaidemuseo.fi

Gunnel Wahlstrand

Turku Art Museum , 6 June –14 September 2025

Jacques Henri Lartigue - The Riviera @ Turku Art Museum

Jacques Henri Lartigue - The Riviera

Turku Art Museum

5 June – 20 September 2015

The grand old man of French black-and-white photography, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986) first visited the French Riviera with his camera and family when he was 11, and from then on he photographed the glamour and enchantment of the region. The self-taught photographer saw around him speed, joy and beauty, fleeting moments of happiness, all of which he carefully preserved in numerous photo albums and diaries. Most of the nearly 200 cheerful photographs in the exhibition were taken in the 1920s–1950s. They transport us to the golden age of the Riviera, with its aristocratic idleness, glamorous society, sporty beach life and parties lasting to the wee hours.

The Riviera (Fr. Côte d'Azur) first became a popular tourist destination in the late 19th century. The pinnacle of its glamour was in the early 20th century, when wealthy tourists and bon vivants populated the sunny coastal area. The mythic reputation of the area owed itself in part also to its popularity as a resort among artists and celebrities. In parallel with his personal narrative, Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs also tell about the transformation of Riviera from the Belle Époque to an emancipated beach resort of the 1920s and a pleasure lovers’ paradise in between the war years. In Jacques Henri Lartigue’s eyes, the French Riviera lost it glamour progressively after the war, becoming too crass and artificial. The change was also visible in his photographs, which began containing a new kind of sarcasm.

Jacques Henri Lartigue was first and foremost a painter for whom photography was an all-consuming hobby and a lifestyle, but it was not until the age of 68 that he was discovered as a photographer in the USA through a set of lucky coincidences. During the last decades of his life, Jacques Henri Lartigue enjoyed the acclaim of the public and his photographer colleagues, and in his native France his rise to fame was ultimately sealed in 1974, when the newly elected president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing commissioned Jacques Hneri Lartigue to take his official portrait.

Recording his own life and its moments of happiness was a full-time job, and Jacques Henri Lartigue left behind 130 carefully compiled albums, some 150,000 photographs and 50,000 pages of diary notes, which comprise one of the most out-standing visual biographies of our time. Jacques Henri Lartigue donated his work to the French state, and it is today administered by Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue. 

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with L’Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue and the French Ministry of Culture. The exhibition has been supported by Mouton Cadet /Baron Philippe de Rothschild and Institut français de Finlande.

Curator: Annina Sirén

TURKU ART MUSEUM

Aurakatu 26, 20100 Turku

www.turkuartmuseum.fi