Review: A Group Exhibition at Hassla Gård
- C-print
- Jul 9
- 5 min read
Hassla Gård
June 26, 2025
Last Thursday I made a modest pilgrimage north of Stockholm – subway to commuter rail to bus, followed by a twenty-minute walk down a gravel road. I arrived at Hassla Gård, a picturesque estate overlooking Lake Mälaren. The occasion was a one-day group exhibition organized by David Schoerner on his family’s historic farm, an old settlement area with activity dating back to the Iron Age. Pastoral, quiet, almost implausibly charming.
Schoerner, an artist with strong Swedish roots based in New York, had always wanted to organize an exhibition on this site. With the property recently sold and the main house standing empty, he knew the timing was right.
The exhibition brought together a stacked roster of artists from New York and Scandinavia: Sam Anderson, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Channa Bianca, Josh Brand, Martine Flor, Viktor Fordell, Marie Karlberg, Mikael Lo Presti, Ksenia Pedan, David Schoerner, Trevor Shimizu, and Stefan Tcherepnin. Yet it felt easygoing – no title, no long exhibition text. Just a summer group show. As Schoerner described, he asked friends who he knew would say yes. Each person then decided what work to contribute, hanging the works instinctually and in a short period of time, often making use of existing nails and screws which made many moments feel slightly off kilter. The distinct character of the space itself offered a sense of cohesion to an otherwise quite disparate set of works, each quietly shaped by the particularities of light, architecture, and a lingering sense of personal history.
A delicious still life by Mikael Lo Presti felt at home here, a small format oil painting hung remarkably high. The work both is and is not traditional still life painting, and in the domestic setting of the house, it inhabited both especially well. With the faded wallpaper and the soft evening light, it felt surprisingly sincere here. Peeled citrus, a classic motif: we see it and know at once that it won’t stay that way for long, making it melancholic in the way of a classic still life and also in the way that photographs are melancholic. Yet this image is more diaristic than a traditional still life, roughly executed and more towards the language of snapshots – a still life made by someone who grew up with photographs.
In fact, there is a lot of photography in this show, and I can see how the exhibition reflects Schoerner’s own sensibility as an artist who works primarily in the medium. I suspect, like me, he tends to see through photography wherever he goes and that the practices he is drawn to often carry a kind of photographic thinking.
A photogram on polyester by Martine Flor also takes on a new resonance in this setting. In recent years Flor has been developing an experimental photographic technique she calls spatial photogram, covering furniture in textiles soaked in photographic emulsion and then exposing the light-sensitive surfaces with ceiling lighting. Here we see a kind of collapsed photograph, a uniquely abstracted glimpse of what is only faintly recognizable as a plastic lawn chair. It is an image that both records and transforms a sense of space, which we feel loudly in the house to begin with.
Included as well are several pigment prints on transparent film by Fia Backström, whose practice also plays with the logic of the medium. Installed across various windowpanes, the photographs become objects as much as images. The works gesture towards documentary and the archive, referencing distant events including the largest labor uprising in U.S. history (so far). However, they are also translucent, and especially through their installation here push against any sense of function or even legibility. The pigment prints layer over the views of the landscape beyond, interacting with the untreated windowpanes as a sequence of frames. Like Flor’s, these works interact with light and spatial depth, but in quite a different way – a kind of poetic opposite. Flor’s collapses and records onto a surface, Backström’s opens up and animates the space beyond. Two very different ways of thinking through the photographic negative.
These works in conversation with the other photographic contributions make for a rich range of practices: Josh Brand’s multiple exposures in both the camera and the darkroom; Ksenia Pedan’s inkjet print under the glossy surface of glass; and Schoerner’s own gelatin silver print, a tree trunk and bare branches caught in the dark by the flash of a camera, with a small birdhouse affixed to the side. It’s a familiar sight made unfamiliar, and an image I can almost hear – the imagined flutter of activity inside the little home. Alongside his photographic practice, Schoerner runs Hassla Books, a publishing project he founded in 2007 with a focus on artists’ books and catalogues. His approach to organizing this show felt like a natural extension of that work, as here too he operates as an artist working closely with other artists' practices. At Hassla Gård this translated into an approach to exhibition making as a kind of thinking out loud between artists, with a responsiveness to setting and a degree of agility not often possible within institutional frameworks.
I was glad to see a show like this here in Stockholm: an informal assembly of works staged in a space that happened to be available and only briefly. Schoerner brought over the works from New York himself, tucked into his suitcase alongside clothes for the family wedding that had brought him on the trip to begin with. This kind of thing – artists making things happen with other artists, with a spirit of generosity and experimentation – is an essential part of any arts ecosystem. I have been glad to see more of it cropping up in Stockholm over the past year or two especially, with many artist-led projects making use of unconventional spaces. In this case, the audience included curious neighbors and family as well as a small art crowd who had made the trip. The more we have of this here in Stockholm, the better – otherwise we are just sitting alone in our studios.
Erika Råberg
Erika Råberg is an artist and curator originally from the US. She is the founder of the forthcoming publication series Working Title, which
publishes conversations between artists here in Stockholm, and also hosts projects in her apartment as Occasional Gallery.