Author name: Natalia Muntean

The relentless forms of Claudine Monchaussé Written by Natalia Muntean Photo by Isabelle Arthuis – Fondation d’entreprise Hermes For over six decades, driven by a “relentless necessity,” Claudine Monchaussé has spent her life getting closer to an image that has burned within her since she first touched clay. At 89, her first major exhibition outside France, “Sourdre,” at the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’s La Verrière in Brussels, finally brings her work into the light. Curated by Joël Riff as an “augmented solo” show, the exhibition places her potent stoneware sculptures, born from the telluric force of the pottery village La Borne, into dialogue with artists across generations, including Germaine Richier and Marie Talbot, creating a conversation around universal symbols and the act of creation.  Natalia Muntean: Your work is described as being driven by an “inner pursuit” and a “relentless necessity.” Could you describe the sensation of that creative impulse and how it guides your hands when you begin a new piece?Claudine Monchaussé: I always had a fire burning inside me that I wanted to put to use with clay. In the first years, I didn’t quite understand what I was doing, but there was an image that stayed with me. I spent my entire life wanting to be as close to it as possible. It isn’t my hands that guide me, but rather, my intuition. NM: You have lived and worked in La Borne for over 65 years. How has the spirit and tradition of that place specifically shaped the energy and form of your sculptures?CM: I came to live here with a potter/ceramist who divided his time between Paris and La Borne. At the time, in 1959, there were still traditional potters. I loved their simple, functional work. La Borne has centuries of pottery tradition behind it; there is a telluric force here. I never wanted to make pots, nor did I ever try, but I always felt that clay would be my medium; it was essential to me, visceral. Some people paint. I work with clay.   Photo © Isabelle Arthuis – Fondation d’entreprise Hermes NM: After working in relative solitude for decades, how does it feel to see your life’s work being brought together for this major exhibition, your first outside of France?CM: I am very grateful to the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and Joël Riff for inviting me to exhibit. The works come to life, and the exhibition reveals the connections not only between them but also with the visitors. I have always felt somewhat overwhelmed by my work, but seeing so many pieces together moves me and brings me a sense of serenity. NM: You have said you never had a choice but to make your work, that it is a “relentless necessity.” Does the act of shaping the clay feel more like a process of discovery, of uncovering a form that already exists, or one of creation from nothing?CM: In my studio, I meet people from all over the world, and every person has been able to relate to the forms and symbols in my work. No matter what language they speak, they are able to access the ideas that I have experimented with. It probably speaks to the fact that everything already exists somewhere. I’ve never left my studio and yet somehow, thanks to many encounters with people, it is as if I have travelled the entire world several times and am the bearer of many civilisations. NM: When you finish a sculpture, do you feel its journey is complete, or does it only truly begin once it leaves your studio and meets a viewer’s gaze?CM: I have always been very demanding with my sculptures. Until now, they have only been seen by a very small circle of people who have come to me to discover them. I always think of someone when I make them, someone I have seen and known for a long time, or even someone I have never met.

Karla Black on material, chaos and the function of art Written by Natalia Muntean Photo by Simon Vogel “For me, culture is no different from nature; there is no hierarchy,” says Glasgow-based artist Karla Black. Known for her fragile, pastel-coloured installations made from materials like plaster, cellophane and makeup, Black has long explored the physical and emotional charge of matter itself. A Turner Prize nominee and Scotland’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 2011, she continues with her current show at Belenius Gallery in Stockholm to blur the line between painting and sculpture, insisting, as she puts it, on “the difficult, messy, chaotic characteristic of human behaviour” that keeps art alive. Natalia Muntean: Your work often resists explanation in words. When you begin preparing for an exhibition, where do you start? With a material, a colour, or with the space itself?Karla Black: The first thing that happens is that a desire arises in me. Maybe I want to mix paint into a particular colour, or touch a certain material like polythene, or scrabble around with some powder. In this sense, I think that my work begins with an exercising of the unconscious, which is experimental.  La Biennale di Venezia NM: You have described your sculptures as having “functions” rather than “meanings.” In the context of the Belenius Gallery show, what kind of functions or consequences do you hope these works might have for visitors?KB: The ambition that I have for my work in general – to force the institution or the gallery to present what art really is – the difficult, messy, chaotic characteristic of human behaviour that is so necessary to allow and to preserve. I hope that my work practically accomplishes something – it forces what art really is into the arena of the gallery and of the historical canon, something that has been very much missing in recent times, as art fairs and commercial galleries and therefore, the prominence of the transferable object has so prevailed. I want to make the real thing, not just some sort of dead historical, immovable object. It should also be ‘difficult’ to move around the powder without damaging it, and to encounter the possible stickiness of the vaseline, etc, I hope people feel this. NM: Pastel colours play a central role in your installations. How do you think their softness shapes the atmosphere of this exhibition?KB: I use colour like I use form. In a way, colour is a material for me. It is really the tone of the colour that is important. Just like the sculptures are almost objects or only just objects, so the colour is only just colour. I never use primary colours because I am mostly trying to get as close to nothing as possible, or as close to white as possible. NM: Each of your exhibitions carries only your name as its title. What does it mean for you to strip away all other framing and let the work stand on its own?KB: It’s a feminist stance. It is also a statement about the importance of abstraction. The ‘great name’ of the artist, as used in museum shows and monographs, is traditionally of male artists. The name itself as title is a representation of the fact that the interaction of me and the space is all there really is.  NM: When you step into the finished space at Belenius, what do you feel the works are doing here?KB: Hopefully, they are embodying a ‘real’ creative moment in an increasingly hermetic, sealed-off, commercially driven art world that prizes the transferable object above all. Hopefully, they don’t appear too ‘finished’ or  ‘clean’  and they are therefore allowing space for the process, for the mess to be felt by people in the pristine gallery space itself. NM: What is the most recent material, colour, or gesture that truly surprised you in your own work?KB: The use of the mirrors is a surprise to me. I never really expected to work on a surface that is attached to a wall. There was always mark-making on my sculptures, and there was an aspect of the sculptures that kept getting thinner and thinner. Although it is a surprise, it also feels like a natural progression. I think I can only make works on 2-dimensional surfaces if those surfaces are either reflective or transparent because, somehow, the work still needs to involve space or the 3-dimensional. NM: Do you see your work as more about exploring the world, or about creating a space separate from it?KB: Both, I suppose. The world is the world. I think my work is part of nature. For me, culture is no different from nature; there is no hierarchy. NM: What do you hope people take away from your show? KB: An impetus towards physical response. Photo by Capitain Petzel

Gavin Gleeson’s Partial Parade Offers a Playful Pause Written by Natalia Muntean “Too far Jacob” Gavin Gleeson found painting at twenty-seven. Or perhaps, painting found him. “I was in Paris, working a remote job, and I had taken a few drawing classes, but I just decided to pick up some paint for the first time and did a little watercolour. That was really the first time I painted,” he says. Born to Irish parents and raised in Kentucky, Gleeson grew up between worlds. “Growing up as a first-generation Irish American definitely gave me a sense of feeling a little bit abnormal,” he says. What began as a peek into painting became a path of its own, leading him away from business and into an intuitive studio practice where, he explains, “I like coming into the studio as if it’s an improvisation session.”  He never imagined it would carry him as far as a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art. Now presenting his first solo exhibition, Partial Parade, at Saskia Neuman Gallery in Stockholm, Gleeson translates how he experiences the world into canvases, inviting the viewer to join him in a “playful pause.”  Muntean Natalia: You picked up a brush at 27, and at 30, you have your first exhibition?Gavin Gleeson: I’m pinching myself, definitely! Growing up, my next-door neighbour was a lawyer by day but painted in his spare time. I would see him paint or make sculptures, so I was aware of it, but I didn’t think anybody painted full-time.  NM: But was there something that made you pick up the brush?GG: Honestly, boredom. I wouldn’t start work until the afternoon and just wanted something to do, so I signed up for a class. Later, back in Ireland, I reached out to a second cousin who’s a painter. He told me what to buy, a few basic colours, and I started painting in my Nana’s garage, using old bottles and family photos as references.Eventually, I found a one-year course at the Burren College of Art, a tiny village on Ireland’s West Coast. When 250 Ukrainian refugees moved in during the war, the population doubled overnight. I would drive past the playground, the kids playing, the women smoking, against this bleak, windy landscape. That contrast between playfulness and heaviness really stuck with me. There was also a Ukrainian artist at the school, in his seventies. We would talk through Google Translate. His work filled whole walls – huge pieces. Even without understanding the words, I could feel the weight of them. It taught me that emotion can be grasped through marks and strokes alone. Portrait by Pelle Nisbel Fjäll NM: Let’s talk about your show, Partial Parade – what does this moment mean for you? And how did you land on that title?GG: It’s very exciting because I waited so long to get started. The show came together at a good time because it can be tough when you’re coming out of your master’s degree, a bit aimless, and you’re just making work to have a portfolio and get by. When it comes to the title, it came from its dual meaning – partial as in incomplete, and partial as in biased. It felt cheeky. Is it a parade or a protest? I like that ambiguity. Humour is a big part of my Irish culture. It’s an invitation to improvise, to question. I ask myself, where am I being partial? Coming from business, from a place of privilege, there are a lot of questions we’re all facing. NM: And does painting give you the answers?GG: Maybe just better questions. A place of refuge and questioning. I think art’s inherently political. I think it’s a really important time for art and painting. For me, it’s a reflection of what’s going on. I feel proud to be a painter right now. I very much feel like a member of a choir more than someone trying to prove a point. And I think that’s really important to me: one of many. NM: Do you have a routine? Is it like a nine-to-five for you?GG: I wish. That’s the goal. It’s a balancing act in London. Initially, it was part-time jobs, jumping in the studio when I could. Now I work full-time and come in on weekends or an evening. I have the attention span of a puppy in the studio, which is good and bad. But with that excitement of, “Oh my god, there’s so much to paint,” it feels like I could keep going, which is a nice feeling. I’m quite a prolific painter. When I go to the studio, I get my painting clothes on and listen to music very loudly. There’s a getting stoked aspect, like getting psyched up for a game. It becomes like a spiritual practice, searching for truth from the unknown. My mantra is “trust the hands.” They’ll lead you where you need to go. “Timorous Machination” “Red Rover” NM: What role does playfulness have in your process?GG: Coming into the art world, I found it overwhelming with all the rules. Then you see a kid with a sketchpad just doing their own thing. My cousin, for example, has autism and is an amazing artist with no agenda. We had this moment of communication through art when we drew one of his cartoon characters. That was right before art school, and that started from play, as so many ideas do. Things get legs on their own.  NM: Who or what influences you the most?GG: Music. My brother’s a musician, my dad works in music now, and my best friend back home is one too. When we were younger, he’d be looping tracks in one room while I drew in another; we would feed off each other’s energy. That rhythm and spontaneity are what I try to capture when I paint. Growing up in Kentucky also shaped me. There’s a strong punk and DIY culture there – that “just make it” attitude. It taught me not to

Alexandra Karpilovski is knocking at her door Written by Natalia Muntean Photo by Elvira Glänte “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

The Art of Resistance: A Conversation with Carouschka Streijffert For over five decades, artist Carouschka Streijffert has made her mark within the Swedish art scene, working at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and scenography. In a world saturated with the new and the digital, Streijffert’s practice is a testament to the poetry of the discarded. She does not simply reuse materials; she listens to their history, taming cast-off fragments of metal, wood, and paper into objects, giving them new meaning. As Drivkraftens seger över motståndet (The Victory of Urge over Resistance) opens at RAVINEN Kulturhus, we talked to an artist for whom creation is a vital, almost philosophical act. The exhibition is titled “The Victory of Urge over Resistance.” What does “resistance” mean to you in your creative process? Is it a physical property of the materials, a mental state, or both?It is in the psychological resistance that creativity arises. It is in the friction, in the complexity, that the work grows, takes shape, is born, and comes into being. To eliminate resistance is to embrace laziness, and then the result becomes polite and empty. To create is presence – a driving force that shows direction. You are alive. You exist. For over five decades, your work has centred on reclaimed and found objects. What is the “call” you feel from a discarded piece of metal, wood, or paper? What makes you know an object has a place in your art?The world is flooded with used-up material, and it’s hard to ignore. I choose to see the possibilities in the discarded, details of beauty, regardless of the material’s properties. My aesthetic brings together the fragments, a dialogue between the hand and the gaze. The feeling of holding and weighing the discarded in my hands, of not wasting matter already charged with obscure experiences. I tame and shape the cast-off into an existence in the present. A collage. A sculptural object. The passion reflects my feelings, experiences, and memories. Portrait taken by Thoron Ullberg Your practice spans art, architecture, and scenography. How does your thinking about space and environment influence the individual objects you create, and vice versa?I create for the person who inhabits the spatial environment. It’s about proportions, the individual in the space. What is the room going to be used for? Here, function is the guiding factor. The financial framework, the size of the surfaces, and the amount of light entering. Is it a permanent room? A temporary room? A scenographic design has the task of framing or enhancing a drama. Scenography is meant to help the actor in the performance and give the viewer, the audience, a visual enhancement. Here, there are no boundaries. Architecture is a form of mathematics, logical analysis. The building, its function, reflects the volume of the rooms and how they interact with each other. The façade and the interior are in dialogue. The visual and functional expression of the materials should strengthen the human presence in the architectural space. Your work is described as both “raw” and “precise.” How do you balance intuitive, raw expression with the technical skill and precision of a craftsperson?A determined skill of interaction between my hands and a sharp eye. The visual must constantly speak to me. Analogue work has been performed by humanity since our beginnings. That talent must not be destroyed or erased. Intuition and skill arise and are maintained through constant practice, and then the difficult becomes a certainty of precision. The simple, bare, and obvious can be interpreted as rawness. Something that is not hidden or disguised by external cosmetics is automatically natural beauty, a form of truth that speaks to us. Much of your work feels like a preservation of memory and history. Do you see yourself as an archivist of sorts, giving a new life to the fragments of our time?Humour and playfulness are constantly connected to the seriousness of my artistry. Valuation and selection are continuously applied in my search for why and how to transform the urban waste into a new existence. This pursuit and stewardship are similar to an archivist’s logical sorting of the past. I house my finds in self-built archives, with a structure based on the qualities, colours, and properties of the materials. It is in these collections that I can repeatedly pick and replenish from the treasure trove of lost and found objects, year after year. The creation is endless. It becomes my own decay that will eventually bring a brutal end to the creativity of documentation. In an age of mass production and digital saturation, why do you believe your analogue, hands-on approach feels so relevant and urgent to contemporary audiences?The movements of the hand, the tempo, create reflection, not nostalgia, but trust. Craftsmanship requires time, a tactile substance. Not like our world’s clicking in front of glaring screens, where we are bombarded and slip off the rapid-fire impressions we rarely can avoid. This makes us blind and deaf to actual reality. Mass production and endless online shopping of unnecessary products will deteriorate our mental health and the Earth’s resources. Thousands of massive cargo ships float daily in our oceans, filled to the brim with newly manufactured “trash.” Why? Humanity has forgotten that the hand is our best tool. Working analogue today is not a retreat but a direction forward.