Mörkveden

Malmö Konsthall presents Danilo Stankovic, Emm Berring, Jennifer Myerscough, Julia Selin, and Selma Sjöstedt, five young artists based in Malmö who are united by their connection to nature and landscape painting. All five artists have either remained in or moved to Malmö to pursue their artistic endeavors after graduation.

Painting a borderland

Mörkveden (the Dark Woods) is, in Nordic mythology, the name of forests that act as border areas between different worlds. Painting shares that ability with Mörkveden: being able to move the spectator from one world to another.

The forest as a metaphor

The idea of the forest as an uncertain, dangerous or unknown place, sometimes beautiful and inviting, at other times tricky and difficult to get through. The unknown forest works great as a metaphor for the process of painting: fumbling in the dark, searching the unknown and experimenting.

Myth meets reality

Mörkveden is not only a fictional place, but has also been the name of several geographical sites and forests around Europe. The combination of an actual place and a place in myth or a fairytale is something that Mörkveden also shares with painting: both create a link between the physical world and the world of ideas.

With nature in common

These five relatively diverse artistic practices has the relationship to landscape painting and nature. Fragments taken from the real world are used as tools to create or explore an alternative, fictional, or inner world. Painting nature, whether fictional or nature that may not be related to a specific geographical place but has its origins in reality, becomes a quest for something inner within the external.