Titled "I Gave Them My Nights, and They Gave Me Back My Days," this solo presentation is Hellberg´s second with the gallery. For this exhibition, she created new works in Helsinki during spring and in Copenhagen, where the artist lived and worked over the summer. In Hellberg´s exhibitions, there are many recurring motifs, symbols, and themes. Labyrinths, rooms, nighttime, snow, overgrown gardens, roses, lions, water in different forms, fabrics, and tapestries. But they are not directly translated. They tend to change state and appear in varying contexts. For instance, the paper works can appear in the bigger paintings as details in a particular room. One feels that various events have happened in the same house at different times, sensed and perceived, and remembered differently although experienced together. In seemingly similar circumstances, there might be other points of view and different truths. Like night and day, the works are rich in contrasts of light and dark hues and other mood indications. Moonlight, cumulus clouds, stars, rain, and flooding set the scenes in the works. "My days." Hours of transformations and possibilities. We do not know who "they" are, but we know they are generous and have given something back that was gone.
The artist invites us into a scenic universe with surreal connotations as a scenographer who permanently moves around on props. An artistic choreographical concept within particular art pieces reflects in the physical exhibition itself. The show has wooden objects, wallpaper, fabric screens, watercolours, and paintings on canvas. Colour plays an essential role in Hellberg´s works, as does texture and the nature of the materials she applies. She makes minimal, very intense watercolours with images and stories, using a wet flow on the paper without any specific ending corresponding with the thick paper with roughly torn edges. Also on canvas, she is working very detailed with oils, inks and acrylics, which give a different character to the whole image. All these details are a tactile part of the final expression. Her works have a strong sense of different powers and different materialities. Parts are fluid, details are elusive and airy, and some are resistant and lasting. Where the floor should be floor and secure, it flows like a river or flood, where carpets should be carpets, it is as if the symbolic elements become acting persons with individual wills and lives. Conditions we take for granted might change. In many passages of the works, it is as if one has just woken up from a dream and can only remember small abrupt glimpses without immediate logic or standard legalities, like reminiscences of days gone. It is uncanny but also as if something unknown could be waiting with surprises and joy.
