Andreas Eriksson: Real Time

i8 Gallery is pleased to present Real Time, a year-long exhibition by Andreas Eriksson at i8 Grandi. The presentation opens on 18 January and will be on view until 18 December 2024. Throughout the year, the show will evolve with the addition of one new painting a month, all the same size, concluding with twelve paintings in December. In the adjunct gallery room, Eriksson presents a new edition in the form of a calendar, which is printed in an edition of 366 to reflect the length of this year. 

Eriksson’s exhibition is the third year-long presentation at i8 Grandi, following B. Ingrid Olson in 2023 and Alicja Kwade in 2022. Spanning far longer than traditional museum or gallery shows, i8 Grandi’s programming focuses on concepts of space and time. The sustained duration of the annual format allows artists to consider how time affects their work, and the fluidity encourages audiences to revisit the changing installations. This exhibition marks Eriksson’s second show with i8.

Someone had borrowed my car and must have turned on the radio. It wasn't the usual channel, so it was a coincidence that there on the motorway I came across the thoughts of Nobel Prize winner Arvid Carlsson on time and death. As a child, he had been anaesthetized by ether and had a near death experience. In exactly the same way, he now believed, as an old man, that death was approaching, and that life/time would become slower and slower the closer one got to the moment of death. So slow, that it would even be experienced as infinite. I asked my friend, the philosopher N-E Sahlin, what time is and he answered as follows: “There are a number of very tricky questions. What time is, is not easy to answer. And then there is our experience of time, which is something else entirely.”

My first memory fits well with Arvid Carlsson's theory. I must have been about nine months old and unable to perceive my surroundings as they were moving much faster than myself or being. But suddenly these two worlds began to converge, and I felt that I was travelling in a tunnel that slowly approached myself or being, and when these worlds met it was as if I was born a second time. I literally landed outside the door of our house and stared into a snowdrift, became snow blind and lost myself again but this time visually and on the "other side".

For Grandi, I have made a calendar (edition of 366 copies) with one picture for each month. The photos are taken in as short a time span as the camera can handle. They are all of the same subject - my snow-covered landscape outside my studio door. Those who look closely can discern a bird passing by.

For the other room at Grandi, I will make one painting a month during the year-long period of the exhibition, so that only on the final day of the exhibition will it be complete, and then we can have both the vernissage and the finissage.

Andreas Eriksson