Gustaf Nordenskiöld Frozen Spot, Frozen Time

Ett Rum, Madrid, Spain

Gustaf Nordenskiöld’s practice revolves around the memory of objects and the imprint of time. His sculptures, objects, and paintings move in the space between recognition and ambiguity, where familiar forms slip toward the symbolic, the bodily, and the abstract. Each work carries the trace of its own making—an action held still, a moment preserved for future reflection.
The exhibition, Gustaf Nordenskiöld’s first in Spain, reflects a distinctly Nordic temperament, oscillating between winter’s melancholy and summer’s intense, blooming excess. The exhibition title, Frozen Spot, Frozen Time, refers to places and moments where time seems to pause. It evokes northern landscapes locked in ice, but also the capacity of art to arrest a gesture, preserve a trace, or hold a memory in suspension. In Nordenskiöld’s work, place and time converge, preserved in a state of stillness charged with presence and quiet intensity.
The project Up North, which forms the core of the exhibition, reflects on the Nordic landscape and its mythic charge, using nature’s shifting conditions as a backdrop for questions of memory, identity, and form. Drawing on sites in Svalbard visited by the artist’s great-great-grandfather more than 150 years ago, the series unfolds as a fictional field archive: flowing watercolor notes of distant horizons paired with ceramic and porcelain sculptures that echo tools, fragments, and imagined artifacts. Water and pigment drift, pool, and tilt across the paper in an attempt to capture a fleeting eternity—to freeze both landscape and gesture. The sculptures hover between utility and illusion, resonating as objects that might have accompanied a long polar winter.
In the series Bless Us Sun, the body appears as another kind of landscape, intertwined with nature’s cycles of bloom, decay, and renewal. Flowers and plant forms recur alongside the human figure as quiet yet charged motifs, pointing to beauty and fragility. Inspired by imagery from 1970s and 1980s independent gay cinema, the watercolor paintings depict anonymous figures held in suspended moments, where desire, vulnerability, and shared cultural memory come into focus. Here, body and nature merge in a concluding reflection on transience and the possibility of rebirth.

Curated by Estelle af Malmborg