Galerie Nordenhake Marks 50 Years with a Three-City Exhibition
Text by Natalia Muntean
Galerie Nordenhake opens its 50th anniversary exhibition across all three of its spaces during the first weekend of July. Stockholm from 3 July to 15 August, Berlin from 4 July to 29 August, and Mexico City from 7 July to 22 August. The exhibition, titled Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City, 50 years, brings together historical works and new commissions by 84 artists, functioning as both an exhibition and a living archive of the gallery’s history since its founding in Malmö in 1976.
Rather than a chronological survey, the show centres on the relationships between artists and the gallery cultivated over five decades, an acknowledgement that the most significant thing a gallery does is not the buildings it occupies or the fairs it attends, but the sustained commitment to artists and ideas over time. Founded by Claes Nordenhake, the gallery moved to Stockholm in 1986, opened a Berlin space in 2000, and established a Mexico City location in 2017. Along the way it gave early shows to Nan Goldin, Mona Hatoum, Antony Gormley, David Hammons, and Jimmie Durham, among others, and has remained a consistent presence at Art Basel since 1978.
“I started my gallery in 1976 in Malmö, a relatively small Swedish city back then. In those early years, the interest in our exhibitions was modest, but I believed deeply in the artists and the vision we presented. Fifty years later, this milestone feels both humbling and affirming — a testament to the commitment of our artists, the loyalty of our collectors and visitors, and the many colleagues who have sustained this endeavour,” says Claes Nordenhake, Founder of Galerie Nordenhake.
The Stockholm space, designed by Gerda Persson and Bo Pilo, opens with Olle Bærtling’s seminal 1951 painting Univers en formation, paired with John McCracken’s minimalist Plank Black-Blue from 1985. Works by Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Antony Gormley, all made during pivotal periods in the artists’ careers, are also on view, alongside photographs from the late 1990s by Dawoud Bey and Nan Goldin, including Goldin’s Ulrika, Stockholm (1998), a portrait of Claes and Margareta Nordenhake’s daughter, taken during the family’s Stockholm years. Important paintings by Swedish artists Torsten Andersson and Cecilia Edefalk are shown alongside newly commissioned works by Sarah Crowner, Ryan Mrozowski, and Ann Edholm.
The Berlin space, designed by Gonzalez Haase AAS, spans works from 1961 to the present. The historical selection includes Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square (Receptive), François Morellet’s Seule droite traversant 2 carrés dans deux plans différents (1978), Michael Schmidt’s triptych Waffenruhe (1985–87), and Jimmie Durham’s Schlimmbesserung (1992). New commissions include a large-scale wall drawing by Marjetica Potrč imagining coexistence between people and nature in a post-Anthropocene rural Istria; a new light and colour installation by Spencer Finch, expanding on work first shown in his 2005 debut at the gallery; a life-size cut-collage by Frida Orupabo, Big Regrets, designed as a freestanding sculpture for the main gallery space; and new paintings by Sophie Reinhold and Paul Fägerskiöld.
The Mexico City space, designed by Frida Escobedo, presents works that speak to the ongoing dialogue between the gallery’s European legacy and contemporary Latin American practice. Historical works by Robert Morris and Rémy Zaugg, which echo the gallery’s founding program, are shown alongside new commissions created specifically for this anniversary by Iñaki Bonillas, José Eduardo Barajas, Elena Damiani, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, and Jerónimo Rüedi. The space, which has served as a vital bridge between the gallery’s European roots and the Americas since opening in 2017, also features work by Mirosław Bałka, Emma Bernhard, Ayan Farah, Eva Löfdahl, Runo Lagomarsino, Silvia Gruner, and Marcelo Pacheco, among others.
Ahead of the openings, a catalogue dedicated to the gallery’s history launches at Art Basel. Edited by Gerard Byrne and designed by Peter Maybury, it features commissioned texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Steffanie Hessler, and María Minera, and includes special editions and unique works produced by Iñaki Bonillas, Sarah Crowner, Spencer Finch, Frida Orupabo, and Håkan Rehnberg.
