Sofia Bjurström's charcoal drawings move. They test the limits of time, of dance, of some Gilded Age in a distant past or distant future. They appear suspended in an unconceivable moment. The Stockholm, Sweden-based painter, about to open her first US solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Shadows of Glass, is a bit of a mystery herself, letting the elegant and obscured black and white works sort of create a bit of a blurred idea of her practice. Her work is a conversation about memory, how we remember, the distortion of the truth of the past and how we present memories into the future.
Part of her work is also about the act of looking. Of watching. With her subject matter being the performance of dance, the action of a practiced recital, there is also part of the viewer that is engaged in watching art come to life. It's the act of watching a creation that plays with the idea of how we remember that feels so electrifying in these works, and something that is pulsating with life. —Evan Pricco
