Anyone who has tried to articulate what creates desire knows how emotion has the ability to evade language. There is a contradiction in the fact that such a direct and intuitive driving force can be so difficult to express.

Desire carries contradictions. It contains both satisfaction that we have someone (or something) we can channel our energy into, and sadness that what we desire is not yet ours. There is also a notion of ownership here, sometimes in direct conflict with one's own self-image. The bittersweet arises in the friction between feeling and reason.

Questions of desire, care and materiality run like a common thread through Åsa Jungnelius's artistic work. Central to her work is how the body and the material are continuously renegotiated throughout human history. Using objects of use as a starting point, she has explored how aesthetics, among other things, is a universal human driving force. By refusing to categorize art and objects of use, her work expresses a belief in design and materiality. The practice rests on an understanding of the world, where the vessel, the stone and the body exist on the same ontological basis.

In the exhibition The bittersweet Jungnelius continues her exploration of cavities, containers and systems. In her intuitive working method, she lets the inherent properties of the materials guide her execution. In working with glass, the process is allowed to remain uncontrolled – an approach in which she relies on gravity and the unpredictability that occurs when heated glass mass is shaped by its own weight. In sharp contrast to the consistent work with glass, the stone requires enormous physical effort and control.

In the random shapes of glass objects, in the perfect arches of marble sculptures, in the mirror-like surface of steel, there lies the bittersweet.

Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten

Caption. Bittersweet, 2024. Glass and steel, 165 x 26 x 35 cm.
Photo: Peo Olsson.