Lotta Grimborg

Images Knocking on Your Door

10 August - 24 September 2023

Throughout 2023, curator Kari Skippervold presents the exhibition series Images Knocking on Your Door in Format’s project room. The series consists of six open-call-based exhibitions featuring seven artists.

Lotta Grimborg explores the language and aesthetics of the sports world and themes circling around anticlimax, unfulfilled expectations, emptiness and sport manners. With a long background on the tennis court she’s interested in drawing parallels between art and sports. Her artistic practice revolves around the fabric’s inherent qualities and enclosed feminine references which she explores through embroidery. She finds her artistic flow in the monotonous repetitions, in the tiny stitches and glass beads that together build a material and form a textile narrative.

Obsession, competition, performance and rivalry. The trophy embodies emotions, becomes a symbol of the winning body but also the wounded body and the struggling body, an extension of your actions, a symbol of perseverance and a testament of success. In the project room at Format, Lotta is playing with the trophy as a symbolic gesture. She can draw many parallels between her experience in the sports world (tennis) and her experience of the art world. In the world of sports she perceives a rhythm, repetition, an obsession, hit after hit, pass after pass, towards a goal. From that she draws parallels to her working method in embroidery where repeated stitches form a material, an image world, a rhythm, stitch after stitch, pearl after pearl towards a goal. Lotta is interested in the linguistics of the sports world and the exhibition is built around expressions like; Going Above and Beyond, Rising Star, and Best Performance Overall. The net is also present, as a dividing line between front and behind, it gathers and collects. The empty ball bags are a symbol of anticlimax and unfulfilled expectations, as silhouettes of something that once had a content.

Lotta Grimborg (b.1988) is an artist working in the textile field, based in Gothenburg and Jonsered, Sweden. Lotta received her MFA in Textile Art from the University of Gothenburg, HDK-VALAND in 2019 and her BFA in Fine Art from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm 2015. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally; Open Craft (Örebro), Susanne Pettersson Gallery (Stockholm), Boy Konsthall (Bollebygd), Dunkers Kulturhus (Helsingborg), Galleri Thomassen (Gothenburg), Galleri Marzee (Nijmegen), Galleri Rosanna Orlandi (Milan), Gallery Myymälä2 (Helsinki). She has been an artist in residency at Boy Konsthall, Icelandic Textile Center in Blöndous and at the Swedish Institute in Paris. 2023 she received a two year working grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

The exhibition is made possible with support from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.