Charlotte Gyllenhammar
Works available
Charlotte Gyllenhammar
Traum
2007
Concrete, steel, gilded silver
Edition of 2 1 AP
400 × 200 × 200 cm / 13 ft x 6 ft 6 × 6 ft 6 ins
Biography
We are pleased to announce a major new commission by Swedish artist Charlotte Gyllenhammar, who was trained in Stockholm and at the Royal College of Art in London, and this year has just completed a commission for Raoul Wallenburg Memorial, which has recently been unveiled in Gothenburg.
Charlotte Gyllenhammar's work is among the most idiosynchratic and expressive within Swedish contemporary art. Many of her works represent states of mind or highly emotionally charged situations that often provoke a reaction of creeping anxiety and fascination in the viewer.
Margareta Zetterstrom,Charlotte Gyllenhammar, 2004, Carlssons
The work, entitled Traum, that she has made for Roche Court is a tower standing at 4m high, made from polished concrete. Inside the tower, visible only through narrow windows, is a tiny, exquisite gilded hot-air balloon. The title, Traum, is a german word, meaning dream, but it's sound suggests other, more ambiguous meanings - dream, room, trauma - that lend themselves to the work. At Roche Gyllenhammar's new commission stands isolated in a sweeping landscape, it's surroundings are integral to the grandeur of the work.
Traum is to do with unsettling our perceptions and creating an atmosphere of tension. It is a fairytale stripped down to abstract elements - the delicate, floating balloon, imprisoned in the heavy, brutal tower, gravity gives the tower it's solidity and the balloon it's flight, these are the paradoxes that run through Gyllenhammar's work. An earlier piece, Turn, 2004, was a tiny golden wagon in a sealed black box, which could only be seen through a narrow aperture. Traum takes the melancholy aspect of the trapped vehicle to more dramatic heights.