MEET GALLERI GLAS

We’re always on the lookout for new talent and innovative exhibitors to bring on board. One of the galleries we are most excited about this year is Galleri Glas, who will join us for the first time at Affordable Art Fair Stockholm on 5 – 8 October 2023.

We’re thrilled to feature your gallery at Affordable Art Fair Stockholm! Can you introduce us to Galleri Glas?

Galleri Glas was founded by Anna Bromberg Sehlberg and Elin Forsberg in 2017 to revitalize a formerly iconic art form of Sweden: art glass. The gallery focuses on contemporary glass art and has quickly become a natural arena for encounters between artists and a well-informed audience seeking unique objects. At Galleri Glas, visitors will discover sensual and expressive pieces that require attention and awaken something inside the viewer; pieces that speak for themselves.

What inspired you to start your art gallery, and how has your vision evolved since 2017?

Before we started, there wasn´t a dedicated platform in Sweden for art glass. We decided to become that arena and to revitalise Sweden’s leading position within what was once such a vibrant space. Art glass is a Swedish cultural heritage, and we must act to preserve and empower it.

In recent years, we have broadened our program to also include exhibitions with art in other media, such as painting and photography.

Do you specialize in a specific genre of art, or are there any works you feel particularly attracted to?

Contemporary art glass remains our focus and this is what makes us unique. We only work with fine and contemporary art. We show everything from figurative to abstract. Within glass, there are traditions that stretch back several 100 years, and we try to work with artists that have mastered the craft, and at the same time bring new ideas and techniques into play.

Can you tell us more about which artists you will be presenting on your stand during the upcoming edition of Affordable Art Fair Stockholm?

Gunnel Sahlin 

Gunnel Sahlin is one of contemporary glass art’s true masters. During her long career, she has presented numerous exhibitions in Sweden and abroad, most recently in 2022 with a successful presentation at Galleri Glas in Stockholm and Galleri Riis in Oslo. Sahlin has won several prestigious prizes and she is represented in major collections including Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg and Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Norway, as well as in private collections all over the world. 

Sigfrid Billgren 

Sigfried Billgren was born in Gothenburg in 1990, but has lived in Stockholm since 1996. Billgren is a versatile artist and creator working in a variety of creative disciplines.

He started his career as a designer of furniture and domestic objects, but soon began to act as a curator, arranging exhibitions of art and design. Having grown up in one of Sweden’s best-known artistic families, surrounded by art, Sigfrid Billgren long resisted taking the plunge as a practicing visual artist.

Emerging artist Sigfrid Billgren caught our eye – can you tell us a bit about his practice and inspiration?

As an artist and painter, he initially focused on colour – the way in which colours relate to each other. He finds inspiration in non-figurative geometrical painting as it developed internationally during the late forties and fifties. The Swedish master abstract painter Olle Bærtling (1911-1981), with his striking variant of the movement that was known in Sweden as “concretism” or Concrete Art, is one of several models from this period.

Sigfrid Billgren has developed a personal, updated version of this strict geometric painting with its own, playful attack in colour and form that, at times, is reminiscent of pop art and comic strips.  Abstract geometrical colour-field painting of the sort that Sigfrid Billgren embraces can seem simple, but it all depends on extreme precision, balance and meticulous preparations. Billgren prepares his paintings, which he creates using acrylic paints, with something in the region of one hundred sketches. He begins with a single colour and then continues adding colours until he achieves the desired result.

Your artists use quite a wide variety of materials and techniques in their art-making processes. What do you look for when selecting new artists, and what do you value when building a relationship with them?

We have different criteria when we look at art and different artists. We are looking for artists with ambitions; art that moves boundaries and stretches techniques. For us, beauty and aesthetics in art are also important. In building relationships, loyalty is important. Continuity and quality are important factors in a long and successful collaboration.

What advice would you give to aspiring artists?

You must be creative and find and develop your own unique style. To do this, start by mastering the tools and techniques at hand. Only then can you divert into unknown territory. If you are aspiring on an exhibition at Galleri Glas, it would be a long and joint process. You need to create a whole collection and we tend to follow and advise closely throughout this work and all the way up to the opening vernissage.

This is your first time at Affordable Art Fair Stockholm – what attracted you to it? What are you most looking forward to? 

Affordable Art Fair Stockholm is evolving under the leadership of Carl Wilhelm Hirsch. We acknowledge this and want to support what we believe is a somewhat different, interesting, and positive platform for art in Stockholm.

We are mostly looking forward to meeting all the art lovers!

Is there anything you’d like to tell art lovers who are new to Swedish art? What are your tips for first-time art buyers?

Look for sculptural art glass which is a highly dynamic and fascinating field. It is internationally acclaimed, yet locally unique, and it is attracting more and more attention each year.

How would you describe the Swedish Art scene?

Sweden has a highly versatile and diverse art scene, made up of small art galleries, creative venues, and larger, more institutional players. It is in constant development and in dialogue with both national history and the international art scene.

And finally, what’s next for Galleri Glas?

Our next exhibition is with Rasmus Nossbring who works with art glass. With his dual background, both as a glassblower and with a master’s education at Konstfack, he is one of Sweden’s most exciting and noticed young glass artists. He assembles new works from older glass objects, samples and collects. He blows, cuts, adds in a process that is almost musical. It is glassblowing at a very high level, with echoes of techniques from both Italian and American glassblowing.

There is also humour in Nossbring’s work, a happy and playful glass art on the surface, but which is coloured by an underlying melancholy, where found and reshaped glass animals whisper about the traditions of glass, forgotten working lives and their own existences as dear but forgotten ornaments. Rasmus seeks out the silent and rejected figures in the backwaters of glass history and tell their stories for those who want to listen.

We look forward to welcoming Galleri Glas at Affordable Art Fair Stockholm on 5 – 8 October 2023 and diving into the wonderful world of contemporary glass art!

Main image: Gunnel Sahlin, Galleri Riis Exhibition, 2022