Hudiksvallsgatan 8, Stockholm
Open by appointment
info@antics.se
Antics is a gallery located at Hudiksvallsgatan in Stockholm. We, the artists Max Ronnersjö and Katarina Sylvan, consider it an artwork in its own right and an investigation into art’s intrinsic value vs. its use-value, explored through a conscious use of marketing, documentation and paratexts. Antics’ conception was inspired by the tradition of artist-run galleries, but primarily by a lack of space for conceptual practices in the Stockholm art scene, be them local or international. However, we do not exclusively exhibit artists explicitly working within the legacy of Conceptual Art, as the criterion is more interesting as a thought than it would be in practice. Antics has been a way for us to take an active part in the Stockholm art scene and to vitalise it — a mission as philanthropic as it is egoistic as we are simultaneously creating the art scene we want to work within as artists. This does not correspond to expecting everything we do to be ”successful” in the eyes of others, nor is that important to us. It is important for us that what we do has good intentions and a sense of urgency. It has to be do-able according to our personal finances and means and we have to preserve a sense of freedom. We also change our minds all the time. We do a show whenever we think there is momentum and we feel excited for it. An artist is often invited to show with us because we’d look forward to talking with them about art. Perhaps you could say that we’re in it for the good conversation. Pleasure is the driving principle. Sometimes not many people show up. Sometimes way too many. Quantity is not important.
New Pictures, New Sculpture
Art Club2000, Ingrid Blix, Anders Edström, Louise Lawler, Tony Karlsson Savci, Mona Varichon, Kai Yoshiura
Opening Friday February 13
80-talet
Ett samtal
Lördag 10:e januari, 14.00
Antics och Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening presenterar ett samtal om 80-talets konstscen.
Deltagare: Cecilia Edefalk, konstnär, Ann-Sofi Noring, fd chefscurator och vice museichef på Moderna Museet och John Peter Nilsson, kommunikativ museistrateg på Moderna Museet och ordförande i SAK. Moderator: Sara Walker, verksamhetschef på SAK och frilansande skribent.
Cecilia Edefalk
TID
November 21 - December 20 2025
We’re writing this in the car on our way to install Cecilia’s show. It’s 9:30 on Tuesday, November 18th. We’re meeting Cecilia and Sara there at 10. Sofia Curman is making a film about Cecilia, and Max helped out with a projection last night for a sequence in the film. He came home late because we needed the media player for the video work. Max started stretching canvases for Cecilia a couple of years ago—probably early 2023, around the same time he met Katarina—and now works with her regularly. Katarina also visits once in a while, doing what she loves most: scanning documents.
Apart from her Självporträtt med Pistol, Cecilia’s photographs seldom take center stage in the lore that surrounds her. The photographs she took around the same time that these word paintings were made are so good—like the stuff she made with her friends in their Mejan studios. It’s such a thrill to talk to Cecilia about that time. Who were her friends? What bars did she go to? What artists were important to her and her peers? With all the photographs’ youthful energy, you can tell she was already herself. Since Antics’ conception, we’ve talked about wanting to show her early photography. However, since Cecilia is represented by Galerie Nordenhake here in Stockholm, as well as Gladstone and carlier | gebauer, doing a solo show at another Stockholm gallery is not a given.
Then Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening, run by Anna Hesselbom and Sara Walker, came along and suggested we do the release for this year’s member’s edition together. Sara Walker, Max, Katarina, and Cecilia (Anna couldn’t make it) all met in Cecilia’s studio in September, where the release event quickly developed into an exhibition. Max was the technician at Nordenhake for a long time and still often pops by on different errands and to pet Margareta’s dog Isa. Max exhibited Ben Loveless’ wooden spoons at an AW. We call them now and then for advice on consignments and whatnot. Finally, the stars aligned to facilitate this kind of collaboration.
Tid’s core is a series of word paintings that Cecilia made in 1983, when she was still at Mejan. They were never kept secret; they are just “earlier works” spread out among friends, early collectors, and in Cecilia’s home. Cecilia had also found stacks of sketch material—words on bits of paper—from which she’d selected the words that ended up as paintings. She got the idea to make a video work that revisits the process behind the words, filming herself going through notes made in 1983 in 2025. We filmed it on Max’s phone there and then, saying we could do a more prepared shot another time. In the end, we used this first footage, as it contained an energy that would be hard to re-stage. We’re showing it here on a monitor that we’ve found and kept for the right occasion. It only sends a black-and-white signal, but it looked good this way. It adds a kind of artificial layer of “the past,” which is a trope that is fun to play around with in this context, as the video is surrounded by works made at very different times in Cecilia’s life and career.
That same session started the inevitable conversations about how these works would come across to a 2025 audience. Sovjet then, Sovjet now. They could look like classic conceptual text-art, but they’re not, strictly speaking. Cecilia selected words that are so dense with meaning that they might be perceived as just as empty—surfaces to project yourself onto. Or to say aloud to yourself until it becomes just a motion of the mouth and the mind, more mantra than manifesto. Conceptual Art with a capital C could be said to let the artist’s idea be the machine that makes the art, and/or to be the idea that appears for the viewer in their mind’s eye. Look at Cecilia’s word paintings and then close your eyes, and see their negative image appear on your eyelids. Somehow, this message appearing as both word and image perfectly connects the dry, analytical branch of Conceptual Art with the wet, Zen-Buddhist or romantic ditos.
However, they weren’t made in the late ’60s but in the early ’80s, where a “post-” must be added to the “conceptual,” and thus a layer of self-awareness. For the occasion of an exhibition in 2025, these “signs” are paired with other types of word-based works. Ceci est une reproduction makes a direct reference to the aesthetics of linguistic art. There is humor to it, though it’s hard to pin down exactly how it operates, nor would this humor ever be successful without the honesty and immediacy that Cecilia is able to charge every single work with. We think about other series of pictures and paintings of Cecilia’s and the tenderness and urgency that emerges when you repeat an image or revisit a motif over and over again, until it’s time to let go.
Around the same time the word paintings were made, the Pictures Generation, as defined by Douglas Crimp, was happening Over There. We’re curious to know the correlation—how many handshakes apart the post-modernists in Stockholm and New York were at the time. Were the common denominators just in the air, or actively discussed over the phone? We trace the morphology of the meaning of the word appropriation from its emergence until now. Many artists, like Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha, worked in advertising, learning the trade and the aesthetic they’d use to critique the emergence of this same trade in the Information Age. Cecilia also started out with typography. This show gives us the opportunity to revisit these things while actually getting to hold in our hands artworks that were made during that time.
We got the idea to do a talk at the gallery about the art scene in the ’80s, which will act as a closing event for Tid but also lead us toward the next group show, described below. We’ll organize this sometime in January, but we haven’t announced it to the public yet.
At the opening of Annika Eriksson’s show for September Sessions, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen asked Max if we’d become a space for hire—a comment as smug as it was poignant. As Antics had mysteriously drifted toward a logistical and financial meltdown, we decided not to squeeze out more shows for a good while. If friends asked, there was momentum, and we liked the idea, we said yes. Doing shows with friends has become a way to make time for hanging out in between full-time jobs and taking care of Rosa. Art is a form of socialization. Meanwhile, we’ve been saving up for a group show, aiming for the vernissage in mid-February, with the working title New Pictures, New Sculpture.
How artworks and art work is valued is of continuous interest to us, and we use Antics as a space to investigate this. An exhibition that suggests alternative views on what an artistic practice can or must be has long been in the making, and spontaneously developed into a kind of “picture show.” Art Club 2000, Anders Edström, Mona Varichon, Kai Yoshiura, Ingrid Blix, and Tony Karlsson Savci are confirmed to take part so far, hopefully with a contribution by Teen Advisory Board and a screening of video works by some of the exhibiting artists as a closing event. This constellation is a mix between previously exhibited artists, our immediate friend circle, and international artists that we’ve admired from afar. After that, we’ll do a solo show with Damian de Arteaga, a painter and Max’s dad’s ex-colleague at ATG.
Once Tid is installed, Viktor Fordell will come and document it. Katarina normally takes the pictures, but this time SAK sponsored a “real” photographer. On Friday, we’ll buy drinks and ice, print this text and the work list, set up the first room as a nice environment for all of SAK’s members to come collect their artwork, prop the door open with the fire extinguisher, and see who shows up.
Annika Eriksson
No Never
September 11 - October 11 2025
September Sessions
Emily Fahlén and Annika Eriksson came by the gallery one day when Annika was in town earlier this spring. We sat down for a while and talked about this and that, different art scenes for example. Katarina thought they were a little secretive but suspected nothing.
Not long thereafter, Mint reached out to ask if we wanted to take part in September Sessions and do a solo show with Annika. Neither Katarina nor Max knew Annika personally beforehand and we usually decide what to show at Antics ourselves but this felt absolutely right. Mint had invited anorak to curate this year’s programme. Annika developed the work that you can witness in the main room in conversation with Mint and anorak and with Antics’ space in mind, but mostly with herself and her cat in her own apartment in Berlin. We only knew that it would be some kind of video installation and were pleased with the amount of information.
Closer to the opening, we all touched base and Annika sent us a sketch for a wall that was to be built. We had one Zoom meeting about the wall and about projectors. Before Annika’s arrival, Max sourced the material for the wall and built it and went and borrowed projectors and media players from Bonniers konsthall and Index, though we ended up not using the projector from Bonniers. Annika arrived in Stockholm on Sunday, September 7 and came straight to Antics, were we assessed the situation and got to work. Inter-mixed with the install were conversations about different cities, art education, mood, children, babies, the 90s, felines, lycra, different cameras and projectors and time for our side-jobs as art technicians and taking care of our one-year-old daughter Rosa. We were pretty much done with the install by Tuesday.
All in all, it went really well and we look forward to hearing people’s spontaneous reactions to the work.
Tony Karlsson Savci
Doing Time
Opening May 14 2025
A text written on the occassion of Doing Time by Tony Karlsson Savci
The first time Max went to New York was to celebrate his mom’s birthday. He bought a pair of Ray-Bans and his card got canceled because it was the first transaction he made in the US. It was right before he started art school and didn’t really know the ins and outs of life.
Max has known tiny for a long time. They must have met sometime when Max studied in Gothenburg, it may have been with Alice and Claes and that gang, or maybe in connection with Max and Emilio and Lars having Revenue. Anyway, they got along, both having a playful approach to art and creation. Tony did a thing at Index 19 in March 2016, raising the price of the drinks and donating the profit to Ingen människa är illegal.
Max and tiny had a band called Jazzkatt, or maybe it wasn’t a band but more of a gang, together with Alexandra Karpilovski. They played at the NUDA paper release in April 2017 at Young Art on Karlavägen, they’d been models and had a photoshoot with clothes from Anders Haal before. They played music at the concert or the performance. Flute was a favorite instrument. Max walked around on all fours pretending to be cat, meowing and stroking himself up against against people’s legs. He wrote a text for that thing:
Blickandes över de
östermalmska vyerna
möttes en ljummen afton sex ögon
det stod skrivet i stjärnorna att;
med smekande steg
och tanken på deg
att vara jazzkatt
det är vårat kneg
tiny and Max did an exhibition at Alma in March 2017 that was prompted by painting and drawing at tiny’s studio at Konstfack. They wrote things like I AM AN ARTIST, AWAKE and JAG SKA BARA VARA MIG SJÄLV on canvases in different colors. They also wrote AWAKE on rocks and painted at Max’s house with Zhala. Tony invited Max to Ann-Sofie Back’s company party in Värtahamnen, it was just before the company went bankrupt. Max, Tony and Zhala made a pillow room, there was karaoke and cute lamps and it was all very cozy. It was quite a messy party but lovely in every way.
They made music together, hung out quite a lot in Bagarmossen and later in Skrapan, and at Konstfack, went to events, burned incense. They were at Daniel Iinatti’s gabber party on a boat on Söder Mälarstrand and walked along the shore in the morning. It was sometime after that that they drifted apart. They found other contexts and other patterns in life.
Intermission
Max showed tiny’s work to Katarina and they agreed that it would be nice with a studio talk. After a big show at Södertälje konsthall and a 3-month residency at ISCP via Konstnärsnämnden, we were curious to see what tiny would do with the promise of a gallery show. We had casual Google Meets studio visits during those 3 months in New York—the city that produces 30 million tons of waste every year—tiny in the morning after yoga class and Antics in bed in the evening.
tiny describes how masses of Amazon packages were delivered to the residency every day to the artists that resided inside. It’s pandemic really, how out of touch artists often are with their materials. An exhibition text can make many idealistic claims but completely leave out the fact that the whole show was bought on Amazon or Clas Ohlson or was printed on demand, be the artist an intellectual or not. These cardboard boxes that had delivered the other artists’ art to them became tinys’ material. Max’s and tiny’s art thus have in common that it’s often made up of what art normally thrusts away. There is something as destructive as it is resourceful in this movement. Art is a big black hole. Max and tiny pick up what’s on the event horizon, turn it into art and thus feed the hole (we are no physicists). tiny describes how they took a walk by Hudson River every evening, getting to know its meandering landscape of debris. A grey piece of plastic caught their eye. They passed by it on several occasions, awaiting the momentum to pick it up. It travelled all the way to Antics, you can find it on the floor in the first room—in case the artist didn’t change their mind about the work and took it out of the show.
Art that has a pretense of being in control of itself is often not very good. tiny makes no claim of being in complete control of their materials or people’s reactions. We’ve conversed vividly with tiny about art, that of others and that of their own, yet we’d find it both impossible and meaningless to pin down exactly what these works are supposed to be. Hence the effortless control.
Katarina likes to paint a mental picture of tiny in New York, saying that the works are jazzy in a 50s NYC zig-zaggy kind of way and tries to remember what movie poster with four leaning rectangles that they remind her of. She realises that she pictures their studio as Stella´s studio filled with his Black Paintings in Hollis Frampton’s photo series The Secret World of Frank Stella, ”what you see is what you see”. She tries to find Elaine de Kooning’s Pure Paints a Picture to give to tiny but it’s nowhere to be found on the blogs. Her referential impulse goes crazy. It’s apparently a regret that she didn’t buy one of David Hammons snow balls, showed some skin in a Jack Smith film or had her work appropriated by Louise Lawler in that show at Metro Pictures or lived next door to Bettina, too old to under take the Whitney Independent Study program and too constantly emerging for a MoMa Retrospective. Anyone from NYC is probably laughing now and probably for reasons that she will never understand. What are we aiming at? At the constant always-already has been. Didn’t take that picture of Adrian Piper in wet paint, didn’t fight with Jack Goldstein, but come to think of it one kind of did. There’s a constellation of stars in each local universe. Katarina asks if tiny has been to any rooftop parties. tiny is blushing. What you see is what YOU see.
Once tiny was back in Stockholm, we went to Bagarmossen to pick up tiny + two enormous suitcases filled with art and took it from there.
SKRÄPETS HISTORIA
Andria Nyberg Forshage
A text written on the occassion of Doing Time by Tony Karlsson Savci
Om samtiden framstår som en oöverskådlig labyrint är det en tillfällighet. Repetitionens logik förblir densamma trots skiftande omständigheter. Det som blir över efter upprepningen är skillnaden mellan då och nu. Alltså har skräpet en historia. Det följer en rytm som saknar rutin men gärna spelar på lotto. En återkommande startpunkt för skräpets historia är avvikelser från en normalfördelningskurva, vilket kan tolkas som queer. Genom att samla och sortera skräpet i en slumpmässig ordning tecknar konstnären ett porträtt av samtidens återkomst. I dess tomma mittpunkt upprepar sig samma form som på dess utsida. Utlyft och upphängt bildar skräpet en spegel som enbart reflekterar sig själv och därför inrymmer historien som totalitet.
Annorlunda uttryckt: historien upprepar sig som ett landskap. David Wojnarowicz fångade detta väl när han i sina memoarer, Close to the knives: A memoar of disintegration (1991), reflekterar över en färd genom den skräphög som av dess grundare fått namnet Amerikas förenta stater. Han skriver: “Maybe the enormity of the cloudless sky is a void reflecting the mirrorlike thought of myself.” Där himlen och avgrunden sammanfaller med en själv uppgår både det transcendentala och den inre upplevelsen i samtidens nihilism. Skräpets historia är jagets historia, men utan dess innehåll, eftersom det redan har konsumerats. Kretsloppet närmar sig nollpunkten. Logistik, hanteringen av komplexa flöden, syftar till effektivisering av denna process. När skräp levereras samma dag som det skickas uppstår en feedbackslinga som överför egenskaper från insida till utsida och vice versa.
Ett exempel på det kallas zoonotisk överföring eller smitta, som när en form eller gest överförs från ett medium till ett annat. Genom cirkulationen av innehåll tenderar upprepningen av betydelser mot kollaps. Ett annat sätt att skildra ihållande påfrestning är genom konsten och dess effekter på kroppen över tid. Porpentine Charity Heartscape beskriver skräpets betydelse för en transestetik genom begreppet allostas, som syftar på en överbelastning av komplexa och sammankopplade system såsom immunsystemet, det endokrina systemet, hjärt- och kärlsystemet och nervsystemet. I sin essä “Hot allostatic load” (The New Inquiry, 2015) skriver hon under rubriken TRASH ART: “When it was really bad, I wrote: ‘Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome”. Den ökade stressen på kollektiva system som ansamlingen av skräp utgör indikerar hur transtillstånd blir till allmäntillstånd.
Skräpets historia drivs av en motor som tidigare kallades klasskamp men idag är bättre känt som kundens tillfredställelse med det genomförda köpet. Genom att leverera varor och tjänster enligt en nyskapande mall skapar konstnären ett mervärde som kommer samhället till gagn. Kvar efter utbytet blir högar av skräp. Det lämnas på gatan, sorteras i utsedda kärl och förs till soptippar där det bränns, återvinns, eller exporteras. Sophantering är ett exempel på cirkulär ekonomi där vinsten går att upprepa vid varje instans längs vägen mot sammanbrott. Eftersom tempot ökar exponentiellt är det viktigt att erbjuda möjligheter till reflektion och kritisk distans. Här spelar konsten en nyckelroll, eftersom den både bevisar och undergräver föreställningen om tingens inneboende värde. Det kallas för avantgarde och följer samma logik som innovation och hållbarhet.
Historien lär oss att den som går i första ledet i själva verket går i sina föregångares fotspår, men baklänges. Avantgardet går alltså sist, efter det historiska avantgardet och neoavantgardet, och på visst avstånd från transavantgardet. Det väsentliga är att det förblir nyskapande, på samma sätt som undanstädandet av skräp är den nödvändiga förutsättningen för nedskräpning. Gilles Deleuze uttryckte denna dynamik rättframt när han i sin utredning av produktionen av mening (sens) och nonsens, på engelska som The logic of sense (1990), skrev: “Do we then sense the approach of an eternal return no longer having anything to do with the cycle, or indeed of the entrance to a labyrinth, all the more terrible since it is the labyrinth of the unique line, straight and without thickness?”. Där den odelbara tiden överskrider den delbara framträder skräpets historia. Och tiden, visar det sig, gör sig bäst på bild.
Sanna Helena Berger
Metod
Opening March 14 2025
A text written on the occassion of Metod by Sanna Helena Berger
Sanna Helena Berger is a longtime internet friend of Max’s, since 2016 or so, through the usual comments and likes and what have you. In 2018, she participated in the legendary Index 19, a wednesday night bar-slash-art-program at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation run by Max, Joanna Nordin and the director Axel Wieder. Looking at photos from that time in preparation for this show, we find various characters from the scene drinking beer and swinging from the ceiling, thinking to ourselves that these pictures can come in handy in many different ways in the future. We talk about documentation. The stern black-and-white analogue photographs of minimalist sculptures and their shadows. The documentation of art-as-art, “from the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions”. The yellow and speedy swishy-swooshy analogue cum. digital pictures of the 90s, often from openings and with lots of people and dogs in them, where all exhibitions look like the kind of exhibitions you’d see in the movies. These days, even when artists have the power to present themselves in pictures of their own choice and in their own channels, they tend to mimic the commercial aesthetics of a gallery, smiling in front of their artwork in a highly edited head-shot taken by their professional photographer friend. What’s with that?
Our pictures often look kinda swishy-swooshy. We’d rather spend the money on the artist and nice drinks and art is supposed to be experienced irl anyway. Katarina is getting better at taking nice pictures of the gallery. It’s about getting to know the angles. We took most pictures with disposable cameras until we understood how expensive it was to develop the film. Antics’ lighting is a salad of spotlights with various Kelvin. We spoke briefly about exchanging them for cold fluorescent tubes but have now come to like the lighting for what it is. Last time we met Axel Wieder was when Katarina did a residency in Norway in 2023 and we went to his house for dinner. Other sites during that trip were Fantofts stavkyrka and the Grieg museum. Joanna is now the director at Bonniers konsthall, located in the same block as we picked up the Dan Graham for our first show.
Anyway, since Index 19, Sanna and Max have bounced attempts to meet again back and forth but Sanna is based in Berlin. When searching our inboxes, Max sent Katarina an email on Mon, Apr 29, 2024, 11:12 AM saying “Vi borde visa henne Puss Max Ronnersjö” and here we are. What followed was a chain of 90+ emails and video calls arranged around our daughters’ bedtimes. Sanna writes the long ones and we reply with the short ones–now a document over the morphology of ideas that lead to the constellation made from Billy shelving units that you can witness in the main room. There is also a small coin in the wall. Before Sanna’s arrival in Stockholm, we drove around and sourced the shelves from various parts of town. They have a nice range of shades of white-going-on-yellow. Some of them–the ones with the glass doors–must be over 45 years old, Sanna says. The older ones are much sturdier than the newer ones, that are more like cardboard. The Lightbulb Conspiracy can thus be applied to shelves. One email from Sanna contains a quote from Jean Baudrillard:
“At one extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the opposite extreme, the pure object devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection. It ceases to be a carpet, a table, a compass or a knick-knack and becomes an object in the sense in which a collector will say ‘a beautiful object’ rather than specifying it, for example as ’a beautiful statuette’. An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject. Our ordinary environment is always ambiguous: functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity.”
It seems to be of great importance though we never had the time to form groups and discuss the System of Objects in detail, the bourgeoisie and their pastels and Jean’s favourite three words “by way of”. Sanna wanted to know more about Antics in order to conjure up her future show. One condition is that we show artists that we think will be interesting to talk about art with. Another one is to contribute to the scene by showing artists that would otherwise not have been shown in Stockholm. A third is transparency. As Antics is a tool to access knowledge about art and the art world not available if you only look at these things from the artist’s point of view, we make a point of sharing this knowledge (whenever we find the time for it). The four most common questions we receive are: How much is the rent? How did you get this space? What have you sold? Is this Cecilia Hillström Gallery? An assumption is therefore that people are more interested in how a show came about than the artist’s footnotes. That’s how the format for our exhibition texts crystallised, starting off with the text for Anders Edström’s Paints series. To mimic his dead-pan process, we wrote an equally dead-pan text describing this process in detail, including which camera he used–a holy grail of knowledge to some and a strange series of numbers and letters to others. The week leading up to the opening of a show, we collect notes in a document and the evening before (but most often in the morning of) the opening we stitch it all together into a text about the exhibition–an exhibition text. We hope that this can give the texts a certain sincerity and urgency, hot off the press with little to no editing. For the Gunvor Nelson show, no text at all came out of this machine. Katarina wanted to write it the night before the show but our daughter caught a fever and we spent the entire day leading up to the opening in the emergency room.
Also interlaced with the conception of Antics were animated conversations at the dinner table about Conceptual Art, in the now and in the then. The points raised were then brought into the gallery and projected at pretty much everyone who crossed our path, forcing them to sit down over a cup of black coffee in stolen Iittala Teema mugs by the Piet Hein + Bruno Mathsson table in the first room and share their version of whatever happened to Conceptual Art and Who’s Afraid Of It? Our first show was a tribute to our fairy godfather Dan Graham, perhaps to set the tone for what was to come. A collector lent us a model for a pavilion and a few weeks after the opening of the show we added our own Dan Graham print. We made our first issue of Kärlet, an art-philosophical journal and sort of love letter to Dan. Katarina wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay titled Why Have There Been No Great Swedish Conceptual Artists?–A Think Piece, riffing on a perceived lack of conceptual thinking (a tautology) about art in Swedish art history as well as Dan’s magazine works.
We liked the idea of putting the office in the front room to demonstrate our honesty and to reference Michael Asher. It’s until this day hard to say if the attempts made by Michael Asher and his peers to turn the system upside-down and inside-out were ever successful or ever will be considered successful, whatever a successful artwork is. Maybe he didn’t think so either. Maybe he was just curious to see what would happen. Statistically, most people probably won’t have much to say about Conceptual Art. Others don’t think about much else. Why is it that a plockepinn of IKEA shelving or some strings of yarn can move some to tears but others not? And as an opposite, why is it that some that are met with realistic oil paintings of Folkhemmet catch the Stendahl Syndrome while others feel indifferent? A text that tries to grasp this conundrum is Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry? by Andrea Fraser that highlights the sentimental side of Conceptual Art through Fred Sandback’s sculptures. You should read it. We saw them, his sculptures, when we visited the DIA Beacon in 2023. We saw Senga Nengudi’s large sheet of bubble wrap on the floor. It was fantastic. We “saw” Stanley Brouwn’s empty room with but a small wall text reading:
how empty is this space?
all the planets, thus including planet earth, are in a constant “shower”
of cosmic rays.
in this space, just as in every building on earth, it is also a case of
“raining cosmic rays”.
walking consciously through the invisible cosmic rays in this space
confirms, intensifies the presence of this space.
stanley brown 1970/2009
We saw The Columbia “C” by the Harlem River on our way back home to Bed Stuy. But a strong art experience is hard to curate according to a trip Upstate, though we were lucky that day that the planets aligned. There used to be a mysterious furniture business on the opposite side of our street in Blackeberg with a system of objects in constant circulation. Each day we were met by the sight of Billy’s (Billies?) and other second-third-forth-hand furniture in various constellations, beautiful because they had just landed where they fell. It would be impossible to make sculptures as effortlessly perfect. We could only take pictures of them, waiting for a great idea of what to do with with the pictures to strike us.
Antics informationsmässa
December 14 - December 15 2024
Stay tuned for the official programme!
Speakers
Paul Sigerhall, Giorgio Giusti, Mats Carlsson with more speakers to be confirmed.
Conversation Piece
Conversation Piece is an ongoing series of conversations, taking the form of “study circles” at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus and led by the artists Channa Bianca and Katarina Sylvan. The name makes reference to Lee Lozano’s Dialogue Piece, in which the artist invited people to converse with her. The artwork existed not in the form of documentation of the dialogues but in the social relations that it sparked. A loosely connected group of visual artists comes together to discuss that which they find the most urgent in the art fields and art worlds today, this time at Antics. Examples of titles of topics are Conceptual, Riff, Ego, Stupid Painting, Withdrawal and PDF. Everyone is welcome to join the conversation.
Books
A selection of more or less informative books by Antics-affiliated artists, Art & Theory, Cycle Press, Renate and others will be available for you to find the perfect information to give to your loved ones these upcoming holidays.
Kärlet Information Edition
Together we collect the very most important information of today into a special edition of the zine Kärlet. A printer and scanner and other useful tools will be available for your convenience.
Anithas kafé
Black coffee, schackrutor and wine for självkostnadspris.
A Metaphysical Striptease
- sketches for Take Off
by Gunvor Nelson
Exhibition on display of photographic sketches for experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s 1972 film TAKE OFF, consisting of ten hand-painted photographs.
Gunvor Nelson
A Metaphysical Striptease
- sketches for TAKE OFF
December 11 2024 - January 25 2025
Antics is proud to present never before exhibited photographic sketches for the experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s 1972 film Take Off. Ten hand-painted photographs will be activated by an exclusive 16mm screening of TAKE OFF on the opening night.
Sam Pulitzer
Does it still snow in Providence?
October 26 - November 30 2024
You promise yourself never to drag your future kid into your art or your writing but when the oxytocin hits it hits differently. The three of us roam the Westcoastian inland landscape just beyond summertime pretending to be a Stone Age family in search for the gold of the forest, chanterelles. We love free food and especially one that is priced 449 SEK a kilo back in the capital. How does one index something so expensive yet so free, so precious yet abundant? We solve this by picking more than we’ll ever clean, parboil, freeze, re-heat and eat and will later leave it to rot in brown paper bags meant for recycling in the warmth of our kitchen. If the fruit of the earth were bought for a song, would there be any need to talk about the weather?
The roam generated the idea to turn the table and ask Sam the questions. Did you read Walden as a teenager? Were you a teacher’s pet? Does free will exist? Does the Pope have a funny hat? If, then?
Back in the car, baby Rosa fixates her 7-week old gaze onto a little neon-yellow fish, one of several stuffed animals (deep-sea creatures) and shapes (stars) that together make up the baby mobile attached to her baby car seat. She looks like a little cartoon mermaid that has just hit her head with a halo of objects spinning above her. The mobile was a hand-me-down gift from Romy, now 3 years old, via her father Sam. Children love babies because babies make them feel like big girls. It’s Rosas first Educational Complex and its terrific because she loves it, despite probably not being able to identify these stuffed symbols as stand-ins for actual fish, nor the concept of “fish”, nor the gravity of the “universe” or the zero gravity of the ”sea” that the mobile imitates, unless this knowledge lies dormant in her small body, all of us having been amoebas in our previous lives.
Max wrote a stream-of-consciousness text for the group show Riffs earlier this spring that riffed on how he’d gotten to know each artist as well as guessing their hometown and their age. Sam was one of them. Max guessed that Sam was probably born in the mid-80s, perhaps in 1984 (or was it in 83?) and maybe in the state of New York. Sam contributed to the show with three questions scribbled around a door in the gallery. All of Sam’s questions come with a given answer and a glossary that explains their components in detail. Despite putting all strings attached to this rhetorical Jeopardy on display, each question takes you on a Little Big Adventure, assumingely differing depending on your socio-economical background and mood of the day. When Katarina on two occasions says that she finds it hard to entertain each question in its entirety and needs to digest them in bits, Sam answers with the questions “Oh, really?” and “What?”. Later, and curious about how abstract Sam could get, we approach him offering him to expand on these questions together with us. What would he show? Nothing?
Sam had set up a provisional work area in front of a window that seemed to act as a portal for the New England goes Hammarby Sjöstad Gothic drawings that were laid out on the table underneath, bridging two distant places that according to Sam are not that distant at all, when you come to think of it. Katarina eagerly wanted to speak about the aesthetics of conceptual art. These days, something can look like a Hanne Darboven drawing but it’s not a score for something that has taken place or will take place, it’s just a pretty drawing. What’s with that?
Our second meeting takes place at the gallery. The suggested framing reminds Max of his very dear Lillehammer -94 Magical Moments hockey card that is now worth 10 USD on eBay. Sam remembers the penalty shot by Peter Forsberg. If [a landscape beyond springtime] an inverted world were a matter of limited concern, would there be any need to suffer [fools] evil gladly? Katarina suggests that obscurity is an essentially neutral quality that can be added to artworks, like, say, yellow or comic. We offer Sam black coffee and a Snickers, both which he politely declines.
Den glada festen
SAK + Antics + Éva Mag
September 27 - September 28 2024
Hej Antics!
Antics är ett nytt galleri som drivs av konstnärerna Max Ronnersjö och Katarina Sylvan, beläget på Hudiksvallsgatan i Stockholm. Under våren 2024 har Antics visat verk av Dan Graham, en separatutställning med fotografen och konstnären Anders Edströms serie Paints samt grupputställningen Riffs, med inslag som en konsert av Mai Edström och release av nya titlar från Renate förlag. På inbjudan av Market Art Fair ansvarade Antics för en konstbokhandel och arrangerade ett program med läsningar och performance under mässan. Antics fokus är att vitalisera Stockholms konstscen genom att stötta konstnärliga praktiker med konceptuella ingångar till utställningsrummet. I förlängningen ser Max och Katarina Antics som ett konstverk i sig, en reflektion över konstnärens möjligheter att arbeta med- eller mot konstvärldens strukturer och hierarkier och ett sätt att skapa den konstscen de själva saknat och vill verka i.
– Antics är ett lustfyllt projekt utan utfyllnader. Vi visar bara saker som vi tycker är oerhört bra och när vi känner att det finns ett momentum, vilket kan vara om ett år eller i morgon. Varje konstnär har dessutom sin egen arbetsgång och den vill vi värna om, vare sig det är ett större internationellt namn eller en lokal talang. Dock ser vi gärna att Antics är ett rum där konstnärerna känner friheten att göra något de annars inte hade gjort, i linje med projektet AW som Antics är sprunget ur. säger Max och Katarina.
Hur upplever ni rollbytet, att gå från konstnärsrollen till galleri-rollen?
– Max ser ingen skillnad på att vara konstnär eller gallerist medan Katarina ser “galleristen” som en roll hon tar sig an. För båda är Antics en del av någonting större som de kallar för Art♡Life, ett förhållningssätt som suddar ut gränsen mellan konsten och livet.
Vilka platser för konst vill ni rekommendera? I både Sverige och i utlandet.
– Nyligen besökta platser som vi spontant vill nämna här är Can i Wien, DIA Beacon Upstate New York, Lars Friedrich i Berlin, Galleri Kanaan här i Stockholm och hällristningarna i Tanum.
Ni har ju som ni nämner även en fot i konstbokens förlovade värld. Berätta om era topp-3 konstböcker
– En aktuell topp-3+1: Jef Geys Kempens Informatieblad och Kulturmagasinet Vargen som varit inspirationskällor till Kärlet, Antics konstfilosofiska tidskrift som utkommer med ojämna mellanrum och senast i samband med Dan Grahamutställningen i våras. Nadia och Häxornas skrifter; Nadia Maghder har ställt ut på galleriet och Häxorna läste när vi hade bokhandel och performanceprogram på Market Art Fair. Katarina vill nämna Mike Kelleys Why I Got Into Art (Vaseline Muses) och Max vill ta tillfället att minnas Pär Darrell, en vän från Valand tillika karaktär med en attityd som nog var för stor för Sverige, som gjorde flera oförglömliga zines om fenomen som rave och graffiti. Till minne av Pär gjordes en bok av HOV:PRESS, som ni alla är välkomna att komma och titta i på galleriet. – Hösten öppnar med Den glada festen tillsammans med SAK. Därefter ser vi en separatutställning med Sam Pulitzer med vernissage i oktober. I slutet av november visas aldrig tidigare visade bilder ur Gunvor Nelsons arkiv aktiverat av en 16mm filmvisning av hennes film Take Off. I december är det Antics informationsmässa, 2.0-versionen av förra årets konstbokmässa och inspirerad av utställningen Information på MoMa 1970. Antics beskriver mässan som “en slags casual men elegant hobbymässa där konstnärer och vänner till galleriet presenterar sina hjärteämnen genom samtal och power-pointpresentationer, för att bredda idén om konstnärens självpublicering.”
Med detta sagt är Antics i fortsatt rörelse och schemat är under ständig omförhandling.
Sara Walker 2024
Riffs
Channa Bianca, Saskia Holmkvist, Nadia Maghder, Sam Pulitzer, Carla-Luisa Reuter
May 15 - June 15
Around 2013 I worked at a restaurant in Gothenburg and that summer we were swimming at Saltholmen and
I burned myself on a jellyfish, that was when Channa Bianca came walking over the rocks, we had probably met before but I have a memory of her there and then, do not know if she was an artist then but I have followed her painting and drawing since then more or less. We showed Channa at the subway gallery Kl. 9 as well and I have one of her butt paintings on the bedroom wall that I bought from her in connection with that show. Channa and Katarina organize a study circle every other Tuesday at Hägerstensåsen’s medborgarhus called
Conversation Piece which is sometimes misspelled by the community center staff to peace which is fun. She is probably from Stockholm and born in the early 1990s I think.
I met Saskia Holmkvist long before that at the preparatory art school I spent my first CSN money on, a strange place, it was just after I had done my military service and Saskia visited and showed her film Interview with Saskia Holmkvist and I was completely floored, partly because it was so good and partly because Saskia was so cool, I hadn’t thought that an artist could be like that, there was something about that attitude to art that appealed to me, the form followed the concept. We met a few years ago when I was working at a kindergarten, she’s probably also from Stockholm, born in the 70s definitely.
I met Sam Pulitzer at Rehnsgatan 3 where I helped Beata with the space she ran for a few years around 2015-16 and Sam had an exhibition there with a lot of hay and this and that, a couple of actors and Sam performed a kind of MUD, I don’t think we talked much but even before that I knew his girlfriend Marie (don’t know how, mutual friends maybe) and a while ago they moved to Stockholm and then Katarina and I were there for a brunch and ate a lot of Swiss cheese, then it was important that we did not check his latest art but we returned
a few weeks later and had a real studio visit, or home visit - he drew in a room in the apartment and he showed us his questions, very smart to show questions as art and we talked about Conceptual art. It’s text and his own handwriting, we have very similar handwriting, a mix between regular text and cursive style, us who never really learned to write nicely, he was probably born in the mid-80s like me, maybe we are born in the same year. Maybe in the state of New York?
Katarina knows Carla-Luisa Reuter since her time in Berlin, I have never met Carla, only on video link or Google meets to be platform specific. That is to have met these days I guess, I was struck by her socialist realist painting, I thought of the futurists and runaway steam locomotives, but a girl in uniform who kind of pulls the locomotive behind her in an invisible chain I imagine. Carla-Luisa was probably born in the 1990s, I think maybe in the Berlin area.
Nadia Maghder came in on a whim as we thought she was missing from the show, she showed a Falu sausage taped to the wall once at AW and her pipas work and she was in our apartment exhibition at Alphas’. We had a meeting in her studio in Ingenting and just before we left she showed us her photo of a shopping cart she found at an ICA, it was a lonely old man’s groceries. The artworks she has done, there are not many I think, are all good; Falu sausage, shopping cart, sunflower seeds, door, mail. She has an attitude and integrity that I respect, she is probably the youngest of the bunch born in 1992 if I may guess.
Max Ronnersjö
Stockholm 2024
Antics at Market Art Fair
May 17 - May 19
Every art fair should have a section dedicated to art books. In line with Antics’ mission to supply Stockholm with what is does not yet know that it needs and to vitalise its art scene with conceptual approaches to exhibition making, Antics will take over the Spritmuseum shop and there house a selection of art books and artists’ books, activated by a programme of performances and readings.
Performance by Mai Edström
May 4, 6-8pm
Anders Edström
Paints 2
April 11 - May 11
There’s a small hill next to a golf course that allows for one to be undisturbed. The golfers don’t touch the equipment and the set-up can be left there for days. Edström awaits a day with the right light and weather conditions and gets to work. He sets up one or more tables, preferably close to the ground in order to take pictures from all angles, high and low. On each table he puts a white foam board. It must be perfectly levelled. The foam boards are marked with a date and a number. Edström photographs the foam board with the bucket of paint that is soon to be used on top of it. This connects place, date, paint and results in preparation for a future systematic selection process, as this is an accumulative endeavour. Edström pours paint onto the foam boards. The act demands both focus and a certain tolerance for gravity’s workings, the paint’s viscosity and especially wind-related accidents, though these can be circumvented by creating a windshield from a wooden plank. One pour per table is enough. The shapes become very similar. The shapes also become very different. Some pools are better than others. Desirable is a centred, neat circle with an approximate diameter of ten centimetres but no matter the outcome the pools must be photographed. Black oil-based lacquer has proven to give the most favourable results with properties similar to a mirror. Other colours, paints and lacquers can also give satisfying results. Everything is reflected in the pools. Clouds. Trees. Edström photographs the pools of paint with a Nikon FM3A. Sometimes the paint matures beautifully over three days or so upon which more photographs can be taken. Sometimes the rain has completely destroyed it.
Dan Graham
Sculpture and photo
Release for the zine Kärlet - Dan Graham edition
February 21 - March 7