With this exhibition I would like to tell a story.
A story that has taken me forty years to write.
I see the paintings or sculptures I have made over the years as vowels and consonants.
The exhibitions as isolated sentences.
I'm now going to try to join them together.
Despite the size of the halls, it won't be an epic.
At most, a haiku poem.

Mats Bergquist Lertorp 2021

The majority of the exhibition Mats Bergquist is now showing in the large halls of the Academy of Fine Arts was also included in his exhibition. rest in Milan a couple of years ago. In the bilingual (Italian/English) catalogue for the exhibition in Milan, the title was of course understood rest as rest and as the musical term for pause, the silence between two notes. I don't know if the word rest has any meaning in Italian, but in Swedish it is a multifaceted word. Excellent to give a name to this exhibition.
Rest, as in erecting a monument, setting something up, getting something on its feet.
Or, left, someone has left the room.
But my first thought still goes to the remainder, something that is left over.
At the time of writing, I came across an underline in SvD (2022.01.24) and quoted:

"Politics is about what can be changed, religion about what cannot be changed, reason understands the world, religion relates to the incomprehensible. The fact that with the help of rational reason we can constantly expand the boundaries of our insight and make our new knowledge useful so that as many people as possible have better living conditions does not exclude an awareness that there will always be a rest which on the one hand we can neither understand nor master, but on the other hand we cannot avoid relating to. Love and death, for example. /…/ That something surpasses our understanding is not the same as it being unreal and even if one is left speechless in the face of the greatest thing in existence, it has a name: mysteries.” (Sören Ulrik Thomsen)

Once convinced that a minimalist approach to art, where the reduction of unessentials would lead to greater clarity, I found Wittgenstein's famous conclusion in the Tractatus "what one cannot speak of, one must remain silent" quite reasonable. A recently published poem by Gunnar Harding made me think again, the poem ends: "about what one cannot speak / one must sing". This is the kind of song this exhibition offers.

Gunnar Olsson (exhibition curator)

Parallel to the Academy of Fine Arts exhibition, an installation by Mats Bergquist will be shown in Katarina Church.

Mats Bergquist has spent most of his career abroad, with exhibitions mainly at museums and galleries in Italy and Germany.
Born in 1960 in Stockholm, raised in Russia, Poland, France.
For thirty years he lived in Bassano del Grappa, Italy.
Living in Skåne for two years.

More about the artist: http://www.matsbergquist.com/biography/