Saturday, March 10th starts with a vernissage of Carl Lagercrantz’ exhibition “NON-SYMMETRY” at GALLERY GREGER at Hornsgatan 46 in Stockholm. Being a great-great-grandson to the founder of Villastaden (Villa Town) and prominent figure in Stockholm’s cultural, political and financial life, Henrik Palme, Carl Lagercrantz draws knowledge and inspiration in that invaluable heritage. Furthermore, he skilfully alternates the cultural prosperity of the family’s history with his American background. The artist was born in 1972 in the United States of America, where he could both observe and learn from the blossoming of different modern and postmodern art movements, starting with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and ending by Neo-Pop kitsch style of Jeff Koons. The artist usually says, “I do not form my art, letting my art form me”.

His art path began with his mother, who was an artist and also Carl’s first art teacher. Even though the main academic focus finally fell on political science, the painting has always been a strongly integrated part of Carl’s life. He has never stopped educating himself in art and attended painting classes of Martin J. Garhart and classes in sculpture of Barry Gunderson. Through the years Carl has had several exhibitions, inter alia Spain and Sweden. The artist’s works adorn homes of a number of owners around the world.

“NON-SYMMETRY” is a new step in Carl’s artistic development, where he gathers his inspiration from different aspects of our life, such as brutality and poetry of the city landscape admired by J. G. Ballard, letting the art be a filter for interpretation of the collected experience. Somewhere, at the junction of the ideas of Russian Cosmism and the roughness of our hyperreality treacherously surrounded by artificial intelligence, the artist creates his own reality - his art. Architecture and engineering, philosophy and religion, fashion and art, poetry and cosmic space the artist tries to comprehend through his art. It is both his personal diary and his discovery of a world in art and art in the world. Art is a cosmic universe, built on the ambivalence of past and future, placed on the border between abstraction and science fiction, questioning the role of humans. Art is a remedy to comprehend the world as much as it is a way to understand the human’s role in this world.

His artworks are intended to create a discourse about non-symmetrical nature of knowledge, where the latter is seeing as a dichotomy consisting of a hard part and soft one. The soft part is the one we cannot structure as it consists of emotions like fear and love, carried out by the limbic system. That soft part is our creativity, which the artist depicts by placing the latter in the context of the real life stained by the futuristic spirit of the hard – structured and technology-dominated – part of knowledge. Accordingly, he endeavours to understand the future role of humans, based on a strong belief in evolution, in the world we are creating together by means of politics, fashion, technology, art and philosophy. Is it a new transcendental realm we are heading towards? Let’s go and see the exhibition between March 10-14!