Denise Grünstein Nymphaeas

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. 

Their brief existence, which casts them as sudden explosions of colour in murky waters, and the way their roots reach down to the muck, far below the surface, have combined to make waterlilies into enduring and powerful symbols of the human psyche: most of them remains hidden in the depths, a shapeless mess of stems and petioles, but they are driven by an urge to emerge in the light and draw the gazes of others. In her new exhibition Nymphaeas, Denise Grünstein ties in with this story, and adds her own chapter to it. Here, the blossomed flower, which may owe Claude Monet the greatest debt for its celebrated status, is passed over in order to make room for the heart-shaped leaves, which float on the surfaces of dark ponds and lakes, suspended between death and renewal in an eternal cycle in which a new shoot sprouts just as an existing one dies. Just as with Monet, the approach here is an antirealist one. The optics are recalibrated, subjective, and born from an unfamiliar palette–a result achieved by means of the infinity of hues that digital technology makes available.

Upon entering the first antechamber of the Nymphaeas exhibition, the visitor will encounter shimmering, vibrant, biomorphic foliage, which foreshadows a distant, parallel borderland in which space and sea will combine into one. In the background, music composed by Älgbrant plays, oscillating between electronic space pulses and warm piano notes. Once inside the main gallery, one finds the entire space transformed, as the walls are covered with giant, floating lily leaves. At the centre of the space, the viewer embarks on a journey to the depths, a loop of peaceful motion through a maze of oceanic space.

Denise Grünstein 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.