About

Combining painting with found and modified objects, Tea Eklund Berglöw generates images that question the stability of the material world and our place within it. Reflective, materialist, and reactive, her process employs a painterly gaze, a game of showing and dissolving, of gestures and hidden intentions, where all objects are an image, and all images are objects.

Working with fragmented, partial, poor, and broken materials, she intuitively dissects the layers of image and meaning making, and reconstructs signs with close attention for both material properties and the cultural practices they carry with them. The way the artist puts things together is rather closer to taking them apart, opening up more possibilities in reading the object.  

It’s about looking for intimacy and identification in everything. In the empty, in the lonely, and in the longing for belonging. Eklund Berglöw employs both a logic of romanticization (adding stories, lies, deceptions, speculations), and detachment (taking a step back), bringing together materials that are out of place and time to form connections between general and personal/intimate associations. Key to her practice is to test the intersubjective relations between an observer and participant, the viewer and what is being viewed or framed, and how participating in an image often involves turning one’s back on the scene, but also becoming part of it. A beaded curtain with an image of Mona Lisa hangs in the middle of the space, but the model’s image is excised from the picture. We mirror ourselves in what we are looking at, searching for faces and recognition, and with no one looking back at us, we fill in the picture, and we look through her subjective gaze. This logic of seeing as a method for feeling seen is continued in Guardian Angels, a double-sided image of faces in closeup who serve as witnesses, mascots, and protagonists. Once the crying ‘guardians’ of a shoemaking shop, the weathered and degraded cardboard is exposed as a sad and emotional material, full of hidden stories but also a painterly quality. They function as both the subjects and objects of surveillance, affirming and returning the presence of the gaze and conflating activity and passivity. 

Eklund Berglöw’s assemblages tease the uncanny qualities of discarded materials, where the addition of one material influences the aesthetic and symbolic qualities of the others. In four shells, a folded pile of tarps and upholstery fabric support a pair of shells and two white Pinocchio masks nested in each other, stimulating notions of protection, theater, animism, value, repetition, difference, and the coverings we wear. These enigmatic combinations and traces serve as poems and riddles that inspire the viewer to read the affinities and contradictions between the elements, but most importantly to see them as images in and of time and space. There is no nostalgia or sentimentality here, instead Eklund Berglöw emphasizes transience and speculation. With both inviting and threatening elements, the image objects carry a seducing, almost erotic force, an alluring sensitivity to detail, shape, subtly, and color, yet they are also trashy, repelling, or easily overlooked. There is a vicarious embarrassment in the prosaicness of the found bric-a-brac, they display trends, the circulation of things, and the ignored life of materials. Exploring what it means to belong and connect our world, Eklund Berglöw examines how things fit in and don’t, oscillating between seeing things for what they are, and what they could be. The images these things make together are a mirror, but also a backdrop. 

Tea Eklund Berglöw, Interview (2024), shell, magazine, shoes

Tea Eklund Berglöw, JAWS (2024), takeaway cup holder, belt buckle, glass

Tea Eklund Berglöw, Juice (2024), plastic tub, glass ball

Tea Eklund Berglöw, Mona Lisa (2022), found object

Tea Eklund Berglöw, ARTSTAR (2024), Lilly, hair claw clip, metal broom handle

Tea Eklund Berglöw, Guardian Angels (2023), found object

Tea Eklund Berglöw, And a 1, 2, 3, 4 (2023), shells, masks, textile, plastic

Tea Eklund Berglöw, From the top / Back to the view (2023) oil, acrylic on canvas