"Out" by Charlotte Gyllenhammar from the Tom Böttiger Collection
Charlotte Gyllenhammar
"Out"
Charlotte Gyllenhammar is an artist with her own universe where perspectives are often inverted. In her public breakthrough in 1993, with the piece "Die for You," she suspended an oak tree with its roots up and its crown down over Drottninggatan in Stockholm. In September 2023, a new version of the artwork was placed in the same location, now titled "Die for You/Take Root."
The upside-down hanging oak tree, bronze sculptures of vulnerable women hanging upside down or toddlers wrapped in bulky overalls evoking feelings of both tenderness and unease, film projections, and photographs – Charlotte Gyllenhammar effortlessly navigates between different worlds, techniques, and forms of expression. Her artistry moves within a tension between identity, fragility, and transformation. She explores what it means to be human, cast into a reality we have no control over, neither in terms of the family we are born into nor the society we grow up in.
"I am my own planet, and I look out from my head with rays that hit what enters my solar system. And there is a great difference between looking and truly seeing. Just as there is a great difference between what is revealed during the day and what you experience at night, there is such power in seeing, not just perceiving the purely optical, but the act of seeing that is close to insight. Compare it to the English 'I see,' with what happens in consciousness when insight arises, when something is truly seen, equivalent to being understood on a deeper level," Charlotte Gyllenhammar explains (exhibition at Fotografiska, 2017).
Gyllenhammar shows how participation can turn into paralysis and how life can turn into death. Still, she also shows the opposite - how dead forms can come to life through duplication or deformation, how seemingly isolated works can be activated by the movements of bodies in space and ongoing social interactions.
Charlotte Gyllenhammar was born in 1963 in Gothenburg. She was educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and The Royal College of Art in London. Gyllenhammar is represented in many collections with individual works and has created numerous public works, such as the memorial monument to Dag Hammarskjöld at Uppsala Castle and a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg commissioned by the City of Gothenburg. She has participated in several international exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Venice Biennale in Italy, and the Biwako Biennale in Japan in 2020. Gyllenhammar has been named Artist of the Year 2023 by Princess Estelle's Cultural Foundation and has created a site-specific sculpture permanently displayed in Princess Estelle's sculpture park on Royal Djurgården in Stockholm.
The work will be sold at Tom Böttiger Collection
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