Contemporary Art & Design Presents Linn Fernström

The auction's painting “Det trasiga rummet” is a powerful example of Linn Fernström’s ability to transform the everyday into something both beautiful and deeply unsettling. In the work, we encounter a familiar, almost idyllic interior space, but something feels off - as the title suggests, this is not a safe home, but a room where existence has quite literally and symbolically fallen apart. The painting, which was exhibited in "Linn Fernström" at Galleri Lars Bohman in 2005, contains many of the recurring motifs from Fernström’s visual world: the child with severed arms, the tiger cub, the threads hanging from the sky, and not least the artist herself here depicted in a vividly pink armchair, lying with closed eyes and pens in hand. It is a scene frozen in time, like a surreal still life, where we cannot tell whether the figures we observe are alive or dead. On the table in front of them lies a photograph, a memory of joy acting as a visual contrast to the quiet horror in the room. Fernström uses the paradoxical as an artistic language. What at first appears bright, beautiful, and childlike – a tiger cub playing with threads, a soft sofa, a child’s gaze -gradually transforms into its opposite: absence, loss, a silent cry for help.

As Mårten Castenfors expressed in connection with the exhibition at Galleri Lars Bohman in 2005, Fernström acts as a “disruptive signal in everyday life.” She unsettles our habitual ways of seeing reality and compels us to confront what we would rather ignore. It is this apparent simplicity combined with emotional complexity that makes “Det trasiga rummet” a key work in Fernström’s oeuvre. Here, many of her central themes are concentrated: bodily fragmentation, the recurring self-portrait, the interplay between childhood and loss, play and death. Through her technical skill and her ability to combine drawing and painting into a dreamlike flow, Fernström transcends traditional figurative painting and leads us into a borderland – where time, memory, and identity merge.

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