Denise Grünstein In conversation with Paulina Sokolow

It’s been just over two years since your last major show, Casting.
— That one consisted of a number of different elements: sculpture, film, the model with the rotating table/skirt, the cast bronzes, the interiors, and the music. 

When I spoke to you at the time, you actually referred to it as a circus. This exhibition is a lot more restrained and austere, at least in terms of its subjects. What has happened, here?
— I suppose the brief response to that is that the world itself has grown smaller. The many options we used to enjoy have been reduced to a bare minimum over this last year. The same thing also happened to my pictures. In the summer, I spent some time by a little lake, not too far from the city, and I didn’t really have much else to do besides stand there, studying the lily leaves that were floating around on its surface. It was only after a while that I began to document them with my iPhone. I didn’t really have any defined plans for these pictures at first, but I found myself becoming increasingly spellbound by the tiny changes on the surfaces of the leaves, and the way they shrivelled and disappeared, only to be replaced by the new leaves that were growing below the surface. The lake’s vegetation became my focal point–my garden, even–for the summer of 2020.

This approach is quite different from anything you’ve done in your previous work. Your work is usually done in collaboration with a number of other people, and, perhaps most significantly, some rather advanced analogue large format cameras. Everyone has a smartphone these days, right?
— Yes, exactly, and it made for such an enjoyable change for me! My past projects have tended to be very complex and demand a lot of resources. I’m firmly committed to all things analogue; I really enjoy all the various crafts that go into photography. Now, the smartphone camera has always been available to me, but I’ve tended to use it as a sketching tool. This time, I let that technology take a leading role. It didn’t really begin to gel properly for me until I started post-processing the leaf pictures with an image editing app, which was also on my phone. The leaves turned into explosions of colour and shapes, and the pictures took on a more abstract and playful quality. I’ve always envied painters for the way they can work without the restraint of reality, and this is the closest I’ve ever come to that whole process.

Have you learned anything particularly important while working on this project?
— Absolutely. Once again, it has reminded me of the lesson that my life keeps teaching me: to dig where you stand, and cultivate the art of seeing grandness in the little things. It brought to mind something I read on Instagram, a quote from photographer Wolfgang Tillmans: “Big ideas don't make themselves known as big. They begin with the little, ridiculous ideas that most people would discard or reject. Every successful picture I've done has really been based on taking a very flimsy, fleeting little idea, grabbing hold of it, and taking it seriously.”

Josef Sudek, another photographer and source of inspiration, from another time, worked just like that. He created a whole world out of nothing but the shapes of a few glass vases and the view through the window of his little studio.

Could you tell us a bit more about your working process?
— I would often take pictures in the early mornings, either from the wharf or rowing out in a little dinghy. In the evenings, I would sit and play with these initially rather unassuming pictures in the image editing app on my smartphone.The process involved a lot of trial and error, and sometimes the pictures turned out too dull, or too far out. The process depended on equal parts luck and flow, and on being prepared to approach the images with playfulness. In the end, they grew into a whole theme, infinite in scope, with tiny variations. I made the film, which is a 42-minute slow-motion tracking shot over the leaves, in more or less the same way; I had to perch on the fore of the rowing boat to shoot it. All the pictures in the main gallery are film stills taken from the video. My friend, the composer (Simon) Älgbrant, produced a score for the film, and in doing so, he created an entire auditory space for the exhibition.

What does beauty mean to you?
— Again, I’d have to say everything! But it is also something I have to work hard not to lean on too much.
That’s why there aren’t that many flowers in the pictures - the water lily itself possesses a beauty that seems too obvious, somehow. The brief life-cycle that begins as the young leaf starts to age and accumulate imperfections served as a window for me, something to dwell on. Beauty is a lot more interesting when it comes right up against its own limits.

Denise Grünstein is a pioneering Swedish photographer, and one of the most prominent of her generation. Her new series, which is being shown for the first time, will constitute her second major exhibition at CFHILL. Notable besides her technical skill and her extraordinary sense of detail is the way she manages to liberate her own photographs from any notions of what photography “ought” to be. Her domain is that of the imagination. Ever-present in her portraits and dramatic tableaus is the sense that there is something more, something hidden just below the surface. Denise Grünstein creates a world altogether her own. She has spent more than three decades working on an oeuvre characterised by the mythical and the psychological, a low-key narrative unfolding from her ground-breaking exhibition at Fotografiska Museet in 1981, Bländande bilder, which would later develop into the many series she has made in collaboration with Marta Oldenburg, her model for the last twenty years. Over the years, she has consistently returned to the practice of staging a kind of animated, dreamy chamber plays, and enacting them through the restrained drama of the still life genre. CFHILL is proud to present an all-new series of works by Denise Grünstein–and, as is customary for this artist, a great deal more besides: A whole new world in which to lose oneself.