Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Stockholm based artist Cecilia Edefalk. Through her somber combinations of painting, light projection, video, and cast bronze sculpture, Edefalk’s poetic logic provides a network of repetitions, reproductions, and doubling, that probes the uncertain nature of historical memory, time, and the signifying power of light. Often remarking upon her own process-oriented practice, Edefalk’s scenarios carve out haunting exchanges between past and present, where unexpected connections unfold with sudden clarity. Elegantly asserting the material function of each medium, Edefalk elucidates her rigorous synthesis of the formal and theoretical into a larger, overarching investigation of the paradigmatic dualities that shape the thematics at play within her work.

Bringing together a group of new and earlier works, Edefalk continues to inhabit the interstices between the personal, cultural, and historical that together create a complex layering of feeling, knowledge, and meaning that reifies our everyday lived experience. Inspired by the falling of a birch tree, Edefalk’s bronze works provide an autobiographical account of this traumatic moment of death and fragmentation; an homage to both the tree itself, as well as to the reflexive processes of memorial and mourning. Molded from the same singular branch, Edefalk situates these cast bronze skins vertically erect, poised in a totemic fashion as if animated by their own metonymic possibilities. Frequently alluding to the cyclical motions of the natural world, Edefalk’s vision of the spiritual interconnectedness between all elements appears mirrored in both form and content, establishing a methodological act of conjuring and recalling those systems of remembrance and memory. While Edefalk’s practice is circumscribed by an intuitive and often deeply personal approach to art-making, the consistent use of repetition and seriality in her modes of production points to the ways in which Edefalk brilliantly maneuvers expectations of authorship and authenticity with elusive precision.

Born in 1954 in Stockholm, Sweden, Edefalk has been the subject of one person museum exhibitions including: Lunds Kunsthalle, Sweden; Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Her work has appeared in several group shows including: Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Documenta11, Kassel, Germany; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the São Paolo Biennial. Edefalk lives and works in Stockholm.