15.10.—20.12.2026

There are moving images with sound and light that never leave the projector of the soul but loop through life with unchanged sharpness, unchanged objective clarity. Only one’s own insight ceaselessly and mercilessly moves inward, towards the truth.
– Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern

Magdalena Åberg (Finland, 1972, lives in Helsinki) is a visual artist and a published poet and essayist who has occasionally curated exhibitions with other artists, notably Morbus at Villa Gyllenberg in Helsinki in 2025. She is also one of the founding members of Kohta. This is her first solo exhibition with us.

An artist who is ‘a real artist’ – not a vague or flippant notion but rather a sensation of mutual trust between the artist and her viewers – is always also on her way towards becoming an artist. This becoming involves going backwards, back to one’s origins or roots, and going forward, which usually means accepting a state of less certainty and higher risk.

Åberg’s work has until now evolved in cumulative fashion, through the superimposition of one body of work (mostly paintings but also drawings and ceramic sculptures) onto another and through investigations of various topics and their pictorial manifestations, from the visual properties of shadows and blinds through family histories and autofiction to different historical modes of depicting inner organs and the diseases that afflict them.

In this exhibition of new works (all made in 2026, unless otherwise stated) it is as if she is exiting an inward-bent loop of accessing source material, of writing-through-painting, of seeking depth by anchoring the painted image in lived experience.

As a coda to the exhibition in the semi-detached space next to Kohta’s office, we have hung three paintings in oil on wood reminding us of Åberg’s command of observed – or dreamt – and narrated reality. The (Right-Handed) Writer (2025) shows its author, temporarily hampered by a malfunctioning right hand, holding a quill in her left hand while skeletal wings are sprouting from the shoulder bones. Some might notice the reference to Hugo Simberg’s Sårad ängel (Wounded Angel, 1903), which was once voted ‘the national painting of Finland’. Screening the Head (2023) replicates, in two smaller panels, the experience of monitoring a person’s cognitive capacities on MRI scans of a deteriorating brain.

In the exhibition proper, Åberg is entering a plane that is shallower, flatter and less attentive to meaning. In other words: she is edging closer to what contemporary painting, as a system, is equipped to achieve. The thin and all but transparent polyester canvas, reminiscent of the material used for silk screen printing, emphasises a tension between screen, wall and floor, between what stays on the surface and what shines through it. This materiality, and a chance encounter with old printed sheets for paper models of rustic cabins and noble palaces, provided the impetus that pushed the artist onto the thinnest of thin ices, one where the alchemy of the image either happens or not. Models and inspirations melt into inscrutable substances whose sole function is to feed the painting what the painting craves.

Isolated elements have survived this trans-substantiation in somewhat recognisable form. In the series of seven paintings that lends its title to the whole exhibition the white flaps, meant to be glued together into a simulacrum of volume, are still discernible. Folding in Two Dimensions is both very matter-of-fact and a mystification, much like the paper theatres illuminated from within that Åberg would dream of building during the lavish family Christmases of her childhood. The magic lantern is truly magic, not only in Ingmar Bergman’s hands. Yet it is also just a cut-and-paste illusion. What happens in these paintings, with their nods to mapping and stage decoration, stays inside painting on the one hand. On the other hand the entire series is a plea for the diagrammatical as a system for cross-referencing the intuitive and indexical properties of images.

‘Diagrams have been sneaking into my image thinking’, Åberg says. She wonders if this is to do with her work as a data visualisation journalist in the mid-1990s. For her newspaper she would do both graphs and maps, and she has retained a special interest in the conventions of topography: curves, coded colours and other compressed and economical modes of visual rendering. The three paintings of the mini-series Sections exemplify it well.

If the new works trigged by paper model sheets or topographical maps may be regarded. as constructivist, at least methodologically, then the series Crusaders and Comedians may be associated with the surreal, not least because of the dreamlike interior spaces where tin soldiers appear as if they had randomly walked into a paper theatre. Those figures have, in fact, been printed onto the painted images, adding that physically and conceptually different mode of applying paint to surfaces.

Printmaking, as a genre and as a professional identity, has remained tolerant of artistic projects that in other contexts would be considered obsolete, perhaps because they so easily turn into a style or a mannerism. Magical realism. Geometrical abstraction. Folkloric ornamentation. Social narrative. In her new works, Åberg appears willing to rehabilitate certain aesthetic strategies associated with such approaches. Not in an explicit way – because her goal is still to explore the core of painting – but to add some tools to her own painterly toolbox.

To this pictorial hybridity she then adds spatial ambiguity by joining several large stretched semi-transparent canvases together as oversized folding screens that divide and articulate the exhibition space. These three works are paintings and prints, scores and notice boards. They function as both backdrops and props. They might also be called ‘indoor architecture’, ‘visual commentary’ or ‘thought-images’.

As Eve Said to the Serpent is named after a collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit (subtitled On Landscape, Gender and Art) and incorporates theatrical decoration, orientalising prints of dragons and trees and a red crayon rendering of tangled intestines lifted from an eighteenth-century Japanese medical illustration. (The?) Flood, a more modestly-sized work, departs from a late-medieval illumination of Noah’s Ark, while Screening Le Mont telescopes various references to Mont-Saint-Michel, the iconic tidal island town in Normandy, into each other. The paper model sheet and the travelogue, signature architectural details and a viewer’s footprints in the quicksand of reminiscence.

The theme is developed further in the series Mapping Le Mont and Topographying Le Mont, in which Åberg uses painting as well as an in-between form of painting and sculpture (with parts from a souvenir model of this almost archetypal tourist destination) to render visible the various dimensions that the folding flaps, the visual leitmotif of this exhibition, seem capable of connecting.

Netherland (2025) is, finally, a work in oil on canvas mounted on cardboard that comes across as rather unassuming at first but gives a clarifying indication of Åberg’s thought and work processes as she was embarking on her newer series. As curator Angelika Li points out in her new essay for Kohta’s website, Åberg has found inspiration in Enguerrand Quarton’s altarpiece Le Couronnement de la Vierge (The Coronation of the Virgin, 1453–54) in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, with its ‘topographic’ division of the image surface into Heaven, Earth and Netherworld (or indeed Netherland). Magdalena Åberg has translated its lower central part into a new and free and vital painterly idiom that transforms without deforming and depicts without rendering.