Art

Landet Stay and WAY Gallery Bring Art Into the Swedish Landscape Text by Natalia Muntean “From the first time I experienced Landet Stay, I felt it was a dream project to curate,” says Francesca Berlin, co-founder of WAY gallery in Stockholm. Just outside Trosa, one hour south of Stockholm, a new kind of artistic residency has been taking shape as a result of the collaboration between WAY Gallery and Landet Stay. The cabin hotel, founded in 2024 by Umberto Garabello and Ted Wachtmeister and designed by Andreas Martin-Löf and Tobias Vernon of 8 Holland Street, has been hosting six emerging artists-in-residence this May. “Art has been important to me ever since I was a kid, so it felt very natural for it to become part of Landet Stay from the beginning. We never wanted it to feel like just a hotel in nature, but a place shaped by creativity, culture and thoughtful people,” says Umberto Garabello about the initiative. The residency brings together Tove Eklund, Johan Bjurmar, Anna Mörner, Thyra Weiss, Elsa Ekman and Rebecca von Matern for an open-ended stay on site. There is no fixed brief and no formal exhibition outcome. The works are integrated into the cabins and shared spaces rather than presented as a formal exhibition. Several works have already been installed, and additional works are being created by the artists on site during the residency period. So while guests encounter the works naturally as part of their stay, quietly and without ceremony, the artworks are very much present within the environment. Founded in 2020 by Francesca Berlin, Estelle Graf and Felicia Berlin Baumgardt, WAY Gallery has been seeking a different format to work with art, and the approach developed together with Landet Stay reflects a deliberate departure from the conventional gallery model. “From the very first time I experienced Landet Stay, I felt it was a place where art could exist differently, not confined to white walls, but integrated into the atmosphere, architecture and nature,” says Berlin. Works are available to acquire, offering guests a more direct and personal entry point into collecting. “What also excites me is the idea that guests will encounter these works in a more intimate and unexpected way during their stay, living with them, even briefly, rather than simply viewing them in a traditional gallery setting. The fact that the works are also available to acquire opens up a more personal and intuitive way of engaging with collecting outside the conventional gallery walls.” Elsa Ekman Tove Eklund Rebecca von Matern The artists, for their part, have responded to the conditions the setting offers: more time, fewer distractions, and a material and sensory environment distinct from the urban studio. For Thyra Weiss, who explores the boundary between presence and disappearance through weaving, the landscape became inseparable from the work itself. “My soft materials, meeting the scent of moss and misty landscapes, inspired the creation process. I am interested in what remains hidden around us at all times, things that only become visible if you look very closely,” she says. In her weavings, forms slowly emerge from the surface in a search for the threshold between life and death, lightness and dissolution – “life, grief, and love woven together within the same surface, where memory carries not only loss but also tenderness and warmth.” Tove Eklund, meanwhile, found herself drawing on immediate surroundings rather than memory and imagination for the first time. For Rebecca von Matérn, the experience went further still: “The pieces I created for Landet Stay came from a feeling of being spiritually sheltered and held. I feel connected to the idea behind Landet Stay, that an atmosphere itself can hold you.” “What excites me most is the idea that guests will encounter these works in a more intimate and unexpected way during their stay – living with them, even briefly, rather than simply viewing them. The fact that the works are also available to acquire opens up a more personal and intuitive way of engaging with collecting outside the conventional gallery walls,” concludes Berlin. Thyra Weiss

Klara Kristalova at the Venice Biennale: between desperation and dark comedy Text by Natalia Muntean Twelve metres of tree trunk, covered in hand-dyed Swedish carpets, lying on the floor of Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion like a giant. On and around it, eleven ceramic figures: a fat mouse, an apple child, a warrior woman breaking free of leaves. For Swedish artist Klara Kristalova, the invitation to represent the Nordic Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale was so unexpected that it stopped her working for months. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, the body of work is the most ambitious work of Kristalova’s career, hovering somewhere between desperation and dark comedy.  Natalia Muntean: Congratulations on this achievement! Klara Kristalova: Thank you! I was chosen by Finland, the country in charge of the Nordic Pavilion this year, and it was a big surprise. This was the last thing I expected. For me, it’s huge. NM: Why was it the last thing you expected?KK: I’m not the type of artist they would typically invite nowadays. I wouldn’t say I’m old-fashioned, but I work with sculpture, and my work isn’t conceptual in a developed sense. I have ideas around it, but it’s not a built concept. I think that kind of work is what gets invited more these days. So it came as a shock, and I couldn’t work for several months. I was completely stuck, thinking: This is too big for me. NM: How do you feel the three works sit together: yours, Benjamin Orlow’s and Tori Wrånes’s?KK: I think our three works function really well together. In certain details and ways of thinking, they overlap, but at the same time, they are completely different. The Nordic Pavilion looks monumental and sculptural but also very much like a fairy tale. Tori works with mythology and figures, Benjamin as well, but in a totally different way. There’s a loose shared language, but each of us uses it differently. NM: I read that you used to go to the Venice Biennale with your father. How does it feel to now be representing the Nordic countries here?KK: It’s completely surreal. From a very young age, coming here with my father was an enormous thing – to see the art that mattered in the world. I’ve continued coming as an adult, many times. You just work on your work and don’t expect to be included in something like this, because for me, it has always felt almost mythical. For me, it’s very dreamy to be here. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen NM: Was this a dream come true?KK: I never dared to dream it, it was too abstract that I would ever be invited. So it’s not a dream come true exactly. But when I got the call, I thought: Well, I can retire now. Of course I won’t. I don’t think an artist really retires. You just continue, maybe in a different way. If I take even a week off, I feel completely lost. The work is a way of straightening things out, not consciously; I don’t write plans or intentions, but it helps clarify the mind. NM: Do you have any rituals when you work?KK: Not really. I wake up, walk my dogs, and start. I prefer to have several things going at the same time in one day, several sculptures in progress, which also suits the material, because with clay, you can’t work too long before it needs to dry. So I do a little here, a little there, then maybe some drawings or planning for something else. I like the variety. NM: Do your sculptures talk to you while you’re making them?KK: Yes. They change a lot while I’m working. I always start with sketches – a plan, a sense of what I want. When I’m preparing for a specific place, I think about the space and let my mind make associations, then I weave that together with where I am in my life. But once I start building, it shifts, because the work develops its own voice. It’s in the material, but it also changes in my mind as my hands work. I can’t think everything out in advance and then just execute it. The hand does something to the thinking. It’s a give-and-take. Installation view: How Many Angels Can Dance On The Head Of A Pin?, Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen NM: What did the ones for the Biennale say?KK: They all dwell on this woman lying down, the whole world on her, and also the mother, and you don’t know if she’s fading or coming back. There’s a flat, see-through relief made of wood that’s almost like smoke, a spirit emanating from her. There’s a very fat mouse that weighs her down; he’s the male character, a dominant, guardian figure, but you don’t know if he’s a friend or a threat. He comes from a cuddly toy I had as a child. Then there’s an apple figure – taken from an older work where my mother was a deer, my father a tree, and I was the apple child. Here, only the apple child remains. It’s curious and mischievous, and partly it’s there for compositional reasons; the work is mainly brown and black, and the deep red apple is a colour note. Then there’s a large bronze warrior woman, trapped in leaves but breaking free. She has real power. I specifically wanted something raw and angry in this, not a group of cute figures. NM: Can you describe the body of work you’re showing?KK: The main piece is a very large tree trunk, twelve metres long, that is also a woman. She has a face, hair, and stands on branches like an animal on many legs, with a root at the other end. The whole structure is covered in Swedish woven