PAUL FÄGERSKIÖLD: New Gravity

Text by Christian Andersson, Paris, Jun 27, 2025, Reconsider the Quantum Lobster

When I visited Paul Fägerskiöld in his studio this spring, he told me a story about a lobster. Paul and his brother had found an inflatable lobster, a beach toy of sorts, that they used to hide from each other, and the brothers were never quite sure exactly when and where the lobster would appear next. Perhaps when one of them opened the car boot, perhaps it would fall out of a cupboard or be cunningly wedged behind a door. Paul described how the lobster became much like Cato Fong in the Pink Panther movies, with Peter Seller’s character Jaques Clouseau always on guard against his Chinese servant's ambushes. When Paul mentioned this, my thoughts drifted to another character portrayed by Peter Sellers, Mr Chance, in Hal Ashby’s film Being There. Having lived his entire life shielded off from the rest of the world, a grown man finds himself in a position where the impossible becomes possible, simply because he’s not aware of the world’s fundamental limitations. In the last scene of the film, Mr Chance slowly wanders off on the surface of a castle pond. A funeral speech is held in the background and the image of a man in a dark overcoat and umbrella, walking on water, is accompanied by the film’s last sentence: ’life is just a state of mind’. To me, Seller’s character is the image of the ultimate tourist to whom nothing around him is familiar: Every view and situation is hitherto unknown and thus nothing is decidedly impossible.

As I’m looking at the works that will constitute Fägerskiöld’s forthcoming exhibition, I’m again reminded of this feeling of tourism: The images seem to be visiting us from a completely different kind of place and even though they make an honest attempt to blend in with our concepts, their clothing and shape reveal them to be of distant origins. I repeatedly fall into the trap of thinking that I recognise something that I’ve never seen before and suddenly I find myself in the vertiginous feeling of the reversed situation: I am the tourist here, in a place where entirely different guidelines have been drawn up around me. And herein lies to me the core of Fägerskiöld’s artistry: To let images become manuals for the most fundamental, our existence. Manuals not to explain this existence, but to point it out.

I recall the last time he had me experience this feeling of oddity in a familiar place, at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm in 2020, amongst his series of paintings that together made up the exhibition Starry Night. Here Fägerskiöld collided the universe's actual existence with the way we perceive it, giving nurture to the dream of a variable coordinate in time and space, by suggesting that the stars would allow for it. The visitor was surrounded by star maps with positions at the same time possible and ungraspable, the artist inviting us to glance at both sides of a flipped coin simultaneously: In the dark perhaps a hope can be found, yet in hope the unlit might dwell.

His new works initially fool me to believe that here too I might discover a mapping, a guide towards a predestined position, but I soon realise that it’s more likely the case of a painterly quantum state I witness: It embodies echoes from something yet to come and at the same time it triggers the notion that this something never really took place.

These images are a merge between a precisely outlined configuration and a spherical shimmer, and they seem to me as something perceived out of the corner of the eye: We can suspect what we might see when we redirect our gaze, but once we do, we can never be quite sure that what we’re now looking at really is exactly what was hiding in the periphery of our vision. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, the images both seem to exist and not to be at all: They suggest motifs, which immediately slip away into voids, from which we suddenly see a new motif come forward, that slips away, and so on and so forth… The images seem to deny us a resolution but offer something more fundamental in return: Glimpses of something that they could be.

Episode 9 in the BBC series Cosmos opens with a scene where the astronomer Carl Sagan is being served an apple pie and saying, ‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe’ and when I return to this iconic quote, I think to myself that this may well be what Fägerskiöld is on a mission to do: Creating a universe. Evolution can then take off and I imagine it’s the traces of this evolution that we encounter when facing Fägerskiöld’s art. This evolution is testing, discarding and sometimes also verify fragments for a continued existence. A world is in the making and every now and then Fägerskiöld allows existences from this parallel universe to come find us here.

While walking back home I once again ponder the quantum state that the Fägerskiöld brothers created, and I catch myself thinking that when I later open my front door, I shouldn’t be too surprised if I find a red lobster waiting for me there. Perhaps like me it’s just visiting. 

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He was born 1982 in Stockholm, where he currently lives and works. In 2010, Fägerskiöld completed his studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and prior to that, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include at PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich, 2025 & 2022); Galerie Nordenhake (Stockholm, 2024, 2020, 2016 & 2012); Galerie Nordenhake (Berlin, 2022, 2018 & 2014); Peter Blum Gallery (New York, 2022 & 2019); Niels Staerk (Copenhagen, 2021); Kunstmuseum Thun (2021); Borås Konstmuseum (2019) and Moderna Museet (Malmö, 2013). In addition, he has participated in numerous group shows, such as at Nationalmuseum (Stockholm, 2024); Stavanger Art Museum (2023); Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm, 2020, 2016 & 2010); Olbricht Foundation (Berlin, 2017); Weserburg, Museum of Modern Art (Bremen, 2016) and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum (Stockholm, 2016). Fägerskiöld was the recipient of The Augusta, Oscar and Harry Höckert Prize (2025); The Åke Andrén Foundation's Art Grant (2018); The Fredrik Roos Art Grant (2013) and The Maria Bonnier Dahlins Award for Young Artists (2010).