HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present a new exhibition by Malin Gabriella Nordin, marking the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and her New York debut.
Dreams occupy a central place in Malin Gabriella Nordin’s artistic practice, offering an alternate way of experiencing and understanding the world. In her dreams, she often encounters entire paintings, complete with compositions, colors, and forms that appear fully realized, yet remaining beyond the reach of conscious reconstruction. Nordin approaches painting as a way of staying close to this altered state of perception, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, associations shift, and images move freely between recognition and abstraction.
Like fragments of a dream recalled upon waking, her works hold onto impressions that are at once vivid and unstable, inviting a sense of discovery rather than resolution. They resist direct reproduction, existing instead as memories of something familiar yet ultimately unreachable. The exhibition unfolds within this space between the imagined and the material, where painting becomes a means of giving form to something felt, remembered, but never entirely grasped. The canvas becomes a garden, where the dream remains elusive yet crystalline in the material. Using predominately oil, the constraints of the material slow the work down. Extending the rhythms of the making until they are completely embodied.
The process is deeply physical and intuitive, rooted in the body's memory and its accumulated gestures. Drawing, which she practices constantly and often without a particular purpose or anticipated outcome, becomes a form of training for the hand. These movements and experiences carry into her paintings, informing the physical language through which images take shape.
Working through successive layers of paint, Nordin repeatedly covers, alters, and returns to earlier passages. The process holds an almost archaeological quality, as though something buried is gradually brought to the surface. She is interested in the tension between what is revealed and what remains concealed, and in the moment when an image begins to emerge without having been fully imagined beforehand. Rather than pursuing a predetermined result, she allows the painting to develop through an ongoing exchange between intuition, material, and gesture.
The cadence of this excavation is central to this unfolding. Nordin explores how colors shift and transform in relation to one another, and how the force and character of a brushstroke can convey sensation and presence. Each mark contributes to an internal rhythm, establishing a pulse within the composition. Shapes and structures move, collide, and find their place, while colors alter the atmosphere of the image and create emotional currents that extend beyond its boundaries. As she describes, her practice is fluid and continuous: rippling from one reality into the next.
Malin Gabriella Nordin(b. 1988, Sweden) is associated with her abundantly colorful paintings, often depicting abstract motives suggestive of flourishing nature. Inspired by the transcendental aspects of existence and exhibiting influences derived from art-historical and philosophical movements, her work conveys a timeless quality which allows for enthralling results when paired with contemporary input and ideals. Nordin’s effortless movement between mediums results in a rich output that includes drawings, collages and large-scale metal sculptures. She lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She earned a BFA degree from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway.
