Gunnel Sahlin
Living Matters
9 March -13 April 2023
Galleri Glas
Gunnel Sahlin at Galleri Glas: one of contemporary glass art’s true masters arouses our hopes of spring with her long-awaited new works
In March this year, Galleri Glas will present a long-awaited exhibition of new works by Gunnel Sahlin who is one of the true masters of contemporary art glass. In Living Matters she explains that she has chosen to turn her gaze earthwards and that she seeks inspiration from the earth and from plants as well as her life-long interest in cultivation and the cycle of life.
“I dig where I am standing, where I have always been”, Gunnel Sahlin notes. “My composts are the heart of my cultivation. The feeling of earth in my hands, the first sign of spring in the soil – the sense of life and death; the contrasts that inspire me all the more and evermore profoundly the more I sense and understand the forces that exist in the earth.”
The range of colours that Gunnel Sahlin uses in her new glass sculptures is reminiscent of the very earliest greening that miraculously forces its way through the brown, grey and ochre tones of a long and tiring winter.
“It’s earthy and organic but there is also the colourful persistence as life begins to force its way through the earth”, Gunnel Sahlin explains. “It refers to the earth, the sand, the soil, the scent that is so evident on an early spring walk. There are so many dreams and so much longing there.”
In her Living Matter exhibition Gunnel Sahlin furthers her creative partnership with master glassmaker Micke Johansson with whom she has worked for the last ten years. Micke Johansson trained at the glass school in Orrefors where he became a record young master. He has long run the workshop that he built on his property at Örsjö in the province of Småland. Here, together with Gunnel Sahlin and an assistant he has developed the well-known forms of artistic expression.
“The steps that we take may not seem so dramatic, but for me every detail and every nuance of variation is new and challenging”, Gunnel Sahlin maintains. “Micke is part of my creative process. Without him I am nothing. Just like the earth, the molten glass is a living organism which cannot be controlled, a source of energy, a superior form of life that is always unpredictable and exciting. The process is an important aspect of the whole, and Micke is constantly aware of new possibilities and looking for new solutions.”
When she enjoyed her major breakthrough in the early 1990s Gunnel Sahlin was one of the innovators who, with her fastidious and colourful artistic expression at Kosta Boda, marked a renewal of Swedish glass design.
During her long career she has presented numerous exhibitions in Sweden and abroad, most recently in 2022 with a successful presentation at Galleri Riis in Oslo. Gunnel has won a succession of prestigious prizes and she is represented in major collections including Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Norway as well as in private collections all over the world. In 2018 she presented the successful exhibition Memo Color at Galleri Glas.
“Ever since there has been great demand for Gunnel’s art glass”, Elin Forsberg of Galleri Glas maintains. “Since we have had, on a number of occasions, to postpone the exhibition it feels all the more inspiring finally to be able to show new work by her in Stockholm.”
