8.11. – 21.12.2025

In her Dog Land exhibition Astrid Strömberg turns her gaze to urban environments or, more precisely, to the experience of moving around in them. Previously, she has taken references for her paintings from the digital realm, with the torrent of images and text on screen becoming a room within a room. Over time, Strömberg’s eyes have looked up from the screen, and the entrance to Dog Land lies in the urban space itself – in the memories and emotional states that remain from these places. A key element of the working process for Dog Land has been Strömberg’s walks with her dog. She highlights how being attuned to the dog changes her way of perceiving her surroundings. The dog’s companionship opens up new kinds of impressions and interpretations, which Strömberg incorporates into her painting. Form, colour and space are used to translate the built environment into abstractions that become alternative representations of these places.

For Strömberg, movement itself is a sort of leitmotif, which she might encounter on her walks or when scrolling on her phone, but also in her working process itself. She sees painting as something transient, as always seeming to evade the grasp. While she is working, new clues to follow are revealed, triggering thoughts and ideas. This can become a foundational, captivating force in art. Exhibitions are not a goal or an endpoint, but a passage or transition to something new and unknown. The starting position here is Strömberg’s feeling of curiosity, which energises the working process, and in that process she allows herself to be led. Walking a dog is not about going from A to B. Rather, it is an interaction in which we respond to the dog’s needs and spontaneous curiosity. The dog’s senses of hearing and smell are able to read things that are occurring outside of our own spectrum, and moving through the different scenes together becomes a goal in itself. Moving unsystematically and spontaneously – like a flaneur – also allows room for disorientation.

In her book A Field Guide To Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit writes about various aspects of lostness. For instance, she points to being lost, including physically, as a path to change, surrendering ourselves and navigating the unknown is a way of getting in touch with a place on a deeper level. Solnit also sees dreams as a landscape where a flood of different layers, people, objects, places, times, events and feelings are brought together in new, unfamiliar or illogical ways, yet still carry a message and a meaning for the dreamer.

The urban terrain, too, is filed with a weave of layers. and methods that Strömberg had and applied when working on Dog Land also have parallels with psychogeography – a word coined by the avant-gardist Guy Debord in the 1950s. Cities and their ambiences had been described in the literature, but the word became a headline term for looking more methodically at how our built environment affects our minds and our behaviour. It alludes to more than just the buildings themselves, but also to the tensions that arise in the spaces between them. Cities are a jumble of emotions. Buildings, streets, alleys, parks, and the life going on in them are, in one way or another, a manifestation of someone’s vision, dream, or mistake. We are constantly surrounded by energies that lie deep within the urban landscape. With her strong colour palette and recurrent vertically striped paintings Strömberg encourages us to open ourselves to look at the city subjectively. The city’s somewhat monochrome, drab first impression can then give way to a world of colours, rhythms and patterns. Strömberg’s places are left un-named – that is not the point. Communicating them wordlessly generates a new landscape for us to navigate. In the exhibition she also uses small, barely perceptible gestures to capture the dog’s companionship, which binds everything together into an experience based on communication, friendship and togetherness.

Text by: Markus Åström, Curator

Astrid Strömberg

Astrid Strömberg (b. 1990) lives and works in Uppsala, Sweden. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2020. Strömberg has had solo exhibitions at: Haa Galleria, Helsinki; Gallery Snow, Berlin; and Vallilan Panimo galleria, Galleria Huuto and TM Galleria, all in Helsinki. She has also participated in group exhibitions, for instance, at: Glasshouse, Helsinki; Taidekeskus Salmela; and Kunsthalle Helsinki. Her art is in the Pro Artibus Foundation’s collection.