Alexandra Karpilovski is knocking at her door
Written by Natalia Muntean
“It’s about looking for yourself, trying to find your place,” says Swedish artist Alexandra Karpilovski. I met her amid the creative chaos of building her show’s universe, Howling to My Window and Knocking at My Door. My initial impression of chaos gave way to certainty: she knew exactly what she wanted to do. “I make a plan during the process, but it usually comes quite late,” Karpilovski tells me. Her process rests on intuition – a belief that each impulse carries its own reason. “I have things I want to make, and then maybe something else along the way evolves into something different. It’s very intuition-based and from my own heart.”
The title itself sounds like an instinct, something raw, almost animalistic. It began, she explains, with a painting she made years ago, Howling to My Window, that she never showed. After a period when life was intense and took another turn, she added Knocking at my door. Karpilovski keeps a mental archive of words and fragments until they find a place in her art. “The part I added really spoke to me because it’s like I’m knocking at my own door,” she says.
The show’s DNA grows from her paintings, words, painted lamps, and fabrics, but equally from the small objects she’s gathered across her life: pieces from her grandparents’ estate, her travels, or secondhand shops. When she began preparing for this show, life had unmoored her, and she didn’t quite know how to begin again. Her way back into work was simple, almost ritualistic. “My daily thing was just walking,” she says. “I would go to a thrift store and just find things I feel a small connection to, even without knowing why. But then they somehow fall into place.”
Tenderness runs through Karpilovski’s process – in the way she collects and arranges, giving space to what might be overlooked. In a poignant contrast to the visceral title, the act of choosing becomes a quiet conversation between what remains and what’s been lost. “They may seem silly, but then they become special. They accompany the works for me. They bring a physical, human touch because somebody had them before.” For Alexandra, exhibiting her work is about finding connection: “I think this is what we all want.” The works, she notes, represent different emotional states, her brushstrokes navigating the space where humour and gravity meet. “I take things from myself, but I think there are a lot of universal things that people can connect to.”
The exhibition is on view October 10–19, 2025, at Doubble Space, a venue housed in a former gasworks with raw concrete walls and dramatic light, a setting both industrial and ghostly. “You have to embrace it as it is,” Alexandra says. She saw the space as a psychological ‘alley,’ a journey that starts airy and moves toward the heavier emotions, creating a sense of flow where visitors wander through different states of mind. The works, she explains, act “like windows, looking into people’s different situations.” To complete the experience, a forty-five-minute sound composition threads through the exhibition, made with her friend Danilo Colonna for their music project, Private Parts. “I wanted to create a gathering place, a moment of joy,” she says.
Born in 1988 in Kyiv, Karpilovski says she doesn’t remember drawing much as a child, but recalls a defining moment at seventeen when she saw Marie-Louise Ekman’s Hello, Baby, a work that sparked something in her. She later studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and spent several years abroad. Now, returning to Stockholm feels like a homecoming after years of movement.
Alexandra’s wish for those who see Howling to My Window and Knocking at My Door is simple: “I hope they leave with a sense of openness – to feel more, relax and loosen up. And maybe they might go on their own journey within themselves.”
Recreating spaces, stages and scenes.
Through shifting states, we walk this way, where lines will blur and drift away.
Where in meets out, and ends begin, where dreams and choices lie within.
There’s clarity, a trace of might,
Long sleepless hours before the light.
We watch, we walk, we let things go, we dare, we reach, we let it show
Alone is where we once were two
Just for a moment — something true.
Alexandra Karpilovski
