Exhibition: 'Out of Body' by Nathalia Edenmont

On January 30th an exhibition of Nathalia Edenmont titled “Out of Body” opens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery. Included will be 15 photographs of eggs, and 7 sculptures, some of the same subject, as well as a few lilies in marble, created in Carrara. This is the first view of Edenmont’s major new body of work of the past several years and notably, her first foray into sculpture.

Edenmont is known for her large photographic portraits of women wearing dresses she composes of flowers or fruits and vegetables as well as for her collages of butterfly wings magnified into monumental photographic compositions. For this body of work, she was ready to take a leap into unknown territory, inspired by her personal connection to the beguiling goose egg.

In 2012 the artist acquired a collection of unfertilized goose eggs. When later told she was infertile and incapable of bearing a child, she rediscovered these beautiful objects and realized they were a metaphor for her life. She set out to transform them into evocative, mysterious sculptural forms she could photograph as both object and subject. 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, Out of a Fertile Summer, is an egg within an egg. The larger egg is 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 discovered 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 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 different depth 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 the fault lines in the shells not aesthetically pleasing. She persevered, trying again and again-tapping and pressing the shells, retaining just a precious 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 had 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 in 2014, she has had five US museum exhibitions, along with several European museum exhibitions. 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; Backfabrik, Berlin, Germany; l’Institut suédois á Paris, France. And in the US at Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan; Nordic Heritage Museum, Seattle; and Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Stamford,Connecticut.

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.

Exhibition Dates: January 30 - March 15, 2025