STOCKHOLM.- Every year, the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation awards grants to young artists to support their work. The 2023 grant recipients are Anna Andersson and Maja Fredin, two artists with distinctly different styles of expression. Andersson’s abstract sculptures speak to us on a level beyond words and demand slower listening. Fredin’s installations resemble the rides in a miniature Disneyland, capturing us in the split second when laughter abruptly turns dead serious. What the two artists share in their practice is an emphasis on allowing hand and mind to work together. In performance, sculpture, and installations, the artists are presented in separate comprehensive exhibitions, each encompassing both new and significant earlier works.

Anna Andersson
Different Degrees of Bending

Anna Andersson explores the potential of the sculptural medium, and the interplay between thought and action. In her work, there is a constant pursuit of something, even if she doesn’t always know exactly what that something is. It is the quest for meaning, rather than absolute truth, that drives her creativity, and she embraces uncertainty as a part of that process.

An essential aspect of Andersson’s working method is this daring to linger in a state of uncertainty, a place of freedom and creativity where new ideas and possibilities can be explored. For Andersson, uncertainty is not a weakness but a faith in the work of art and its potential to be powerful even without clear answers.

In her practice, she examines not only what we can observe but also that which is more subtle and elusive, and the tension that can arise in between. Philosophy is a source of inspiration and resonance, she refers to philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt, and their ideas on perception: how our position in the world and our relationship to others shape our experience and understanding of life.

My body is my connection with the world, I reach out and I search. – Anna Andersson

Andersson’s artistic practice is deeply exploratory and intuitive. Her work guides us through the borderland between thought and action, idea and creating, and the concrete and abstract dimensions of sculpture.

Maja Fredin
Searching for my Inner Elvis in a Post Elvis Society

Maja Fredin has an idea-based practice focusing primarily on spatial installations integrating textile crafts and often performative elements. Mixing humour and deep seriousness, Fredin’s interdisciplinary approach includes photography, video, sound, sculpture and costumes. With kitsch, glitter and humour, she creates total works of art enacting absurd scenes that challenge contemporary consumerism and explore subjects such as over-consumption, addiction and dysmorphophobia.

I expand my delusions, twist and turn reality, and invite others into my interpretation of the already doomed world we are living in. – Maja Fredin

The exhibition Searching for my Inner Elvis in a Post Elvis Society builds on the artist’s thoughts and experiences of living in a society based on brutal (re)production and growth. It examines the longing for luxury and abundance, feelings that most of us can relate to even when we know that they are neither healthy nor sustainable. Fredin is inspired by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, who in the book Consuming Life (2007) posits that consumer society is founded on a feeling of discontent; that we are constantly looking for flaws in our everyday existence and yearning for products that claim to make life easier.

Fredin’s art is characterised by impressive craftsmanship and precision. Her skill is obvious in every part, from the dyeing of fabrics and the bedazzling of an Elvis jumpsuit, to the production of endlessly growing piles of prawns in hand-painted lycra and the hundreds of hand-sewn silk feathers on flamingos.

In her explorations of contemporary challenges, she herself questions the notion that “hope is the last thing that dies in man”. Instead, she argues that humour is what ultimately endures.