NATHALIA EDENMONT
Out of Body
January 30, 2025 - March 15, 2025
Out of Body
On January 30th an exhibition of new photographs and sculptures by Nathalia Edenmont will open at Nancy Hoffman Gallery. The exhibition will include 15 photographs of eggs, and 7 sculptures of the same subject made of Carrara marble, as well as a few lilies in Carrara marble. These are the artist’s first sculptures, and this is the first time this major new body of Edenmont’s work will be on view.
While she is known for her portraits of women wearing dresses she composes of flowers or fruits and vegetables, as well as for her collages of butterfly wings that she magnifies into monumental photographic compositions, she was ready to take a leap into unknown territory inspired by her personal connection to the beguiling goose eggs.
In 2012 the artist acquired a collection of unfertilized goose eggs. When Edenmont was told she was infertile and incapable of bearing a child, she rediscovered these beautiful objects, and realized they were a metaphor for her life, and that she could transform them, turning them into evocative, mysterious sculptural forms she could photograph as subject and object. Mostly white against a stark black background, the eggs are also black, and turquoise and red, each having a character of its own. Her magnum opus sculpture, Out of a Fertile Summer Sun, is an egg within an egg, the larger egg cracked open to reveal a smaller one, bringing to mind images of the Madonna and child throughout art history.
Jean Wainwright writes about Edenmont’s eggs:
“Edenmont’s eggs are different, they are deeply imbued with her feminine experiences, of being a woman unable to bring to life a child and it is in the process of her ‘cracking’ that we unravel the significance of these haunting photographs. Having rediscovered her shells she stored, she set to work to find a new way of engaging with her own life force, bringing new life and creative energy to the empty shells. Now colour is drained from her photographs and the process of working with fragility and delicacy lies in the power of Edenmont’s hand. She moves her fingers and palm around the white goose egg shells in a circular motion as one might caress a womb carrying a child, but then she presses with her fingers and thumb in order to crack the shell exerting different pressures to create the different depths and (amounts of) cracks. Her working method is totally immersive, intense, and time-consuming using trial and error. Many of the experiments do not work; the formation of the cracks and the fault lines in the shells not aesthetically pleasing. Nonetheless, she persevered trying again and again – tapping and pressing the shells, retaining just a previous few to photograph and losing around two hundred egg shells in the process. Each haunting photograph of the egg shell seems suspended in an infinite black universe, a potent evocation of life and loss.”
Edenmont was born in Yalta, and moved to Sweden by the time she was 20, realizing that life in the Soviet Union was disintegrating and held no future for her. Sweden was a country to which she could easily get a visa, being alone in the world after the age of 14, when both her parents died and she had no other relatives. At 27, she was accepted to Forsberg Skola, to study graphic design, where an artist mentor encouraged her to visualize her inner pictures and try to capture them with the camera. It is thanks to Per Hüttner that Nathalia is the photo-based artist she is today.
All of her work derives from her life experience. She says: “I only look inside my head. What I see in my mind is what I create. I do not sketch; the image is complete and sharp within me. I have absolute control over all aspects of what I do.” She uses a large format Sinar camera with 8x10 film and many lenses.
Since the artist’s first US solo exhibition in 2014 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, she has had five US museum exhibitions—at Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan; Nordic Heritage Museum, Seattle; and Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Stamford, Connecticut—along with several European museum exhibitions such as at Backfabrik, Berlin, Germany; and ’Institut suédois á Paris, France. Her work has been shown widely in Sweden at Alingsås konsthall, Alingsås; Borås Konstmuseum, Borås; Dunkers Museum,Helsingborg; Halmstads Konsthall, Halmstad; Konsthallen Hishult, Hishult; Kristinehamns konstmuseum, Kristinehamn; Örnsköldsviks Museum, Örnsköldsvik; Sven-Harrys konstmuseum, Stockholm.
She was twice a recipient of Konstnärsnämdens Arbetsstipendium, awarded by the Culture Department, Stockholm, Sweden. Her work is included in the collections of Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden; Kristinehamns Konstmuseum, Kristinehamn, Sweden; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Moscow House of Photography, Moscow, Russia; Statens Konstråd (Public Art Agency Sweden), Stockholm, Sweden; Whitespace, The Mordes Collection, West Palm Beach, Florida; and 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.