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Swedish SoHo
| Article
# : |
20093 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
1,865 Words |
| Author
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Adrianne Marcus
Adrianne Marcus has published in Food & Wine, Menus, Travel &
Leisure, Good Food, Cooking Light, and other magazines. |
Walking the streets of Stockholm is a visual extravaganza. Galleries, on almost every corner, display glass vessels and sculptures blown and molded into perfection, textile hangings in abstract designs, and wood carved into the sleek Swedish lines that are world famous. The real heart of nay city is seldom its physical center--it is, rather, the location of its newest pulse, the action that says that the city is a live, dynamic unit.
New York has SoHo, the area south of Houston Street, where artists have congregated for the past thirty years and were galleries and lofts teem with the excitement that the uptown galleries, with all their recognized names, have never been able to match. In London, the Chelsea area has a similar vibrant distinction--one can walk the street and feel that there is something happening here. In the Marais district of Paris is the same feeling of creation.
In Stockholm this atmosphere prevails in its southern section, in an area called Hornsgatan. Three or four blocks off Stadsmuseet is the heart of a thriving artistic community, with galleries, exciting textiles, and windows alive with color, form, and texture.
Although few artists actually live in the Hornsgatan area, having their studios many kilometers away in places such as Goteborg, Akersberga, or even Simrishamn, many artists belong to Hornsgatan cooperatives, or collective galleries, that allow them to exhibit and sell their work to the wide Stockholm audience.
In the collective gallery called Kaolin, Hornsgatan 50, ceramics are the focal point. Clay is the only common denominator. Each artist has his or her own idea of what constitutes art. Erica Eckerstrand, who studied in the United States and returned to her roots in Stockholm, brings with her a touch of the exotic. Eckerstrand studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and incorporates Indian totems inner work. She finds that cross-cultural pollination has certain benefits. From lizard pins to bowls with geometric southwestern Indian designs, her work unites her love of the southwest with the cold edge of Swedish design, whose lines are excised precisely and whose color is integral, not merely an adornment.
"I loved the United States and working there," she says, "But this is my home. And this is where I create now."
A few doors away from Kaolin is what
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