INKA & NICLAS
ELYSIUM ECHO
...a faint, almost mystical echo of something lost but beautiful. A bright pink wave, a sunset on speed, and a glowing family silhouette in front of a grand ocean scene.
Elysium Echo symbolizes nostalgia, longing for the unattainable, and a vague sense of paradise lost. At IVAR, Tändstickspalatset, Inka & Niclas’ works whisper from another world through colourful and vibrant photographs and objects.
BIO
Inka (Finland) and Niclas (Sweden) Lindergård is an awarded artist duo who works primarily with photography-based art. They have worked together since 2007 and live in Stockholm, Sweden.
The materiality of photography is central to Inka and Niclas Lindergård's work. Their art explores how we perceive nature today. It also examines how photography shapes our view of landscapes. The artists focus on the physical aspects of photos to highlight these connections. Inka and Niclas Lindergård create bright, idealized landscapes in their work. These images do more than show beauty. They reveal how culture shapes our view of nature. The artists use photography to blend reality, beauty, and fantasy. Their work explores the line between authentic beauty and artificial perfection.
They exhibit and are published internationally regularly. Their works are included in the permanent collections at Moderna Museet (Sweden), the Gothenburg Museum of Art (Sweden), Fries Museum (The Netherlands), the Public Art Agency (Sweden), Arendt & Art (Luxembourg), The Wienerberger Collection (Austria), Edit Maryon Foundation (Switzerland) and private collections in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, France, the UK, Switzerland, Slovakia, Portugal, USA, Canada, China, Brazil and Puerto Rico. They were awarded the EMOP Arendt Award 2021 and are represented by Dorothée Nilsson Gallery in Berlin, Bildhalle Zurich and Amsterdam, and WILLAS contemporary.
BOOKS
Extensions, Inka & Niclas Lindergård’s third book, (2024, Art & Theory Publishing Sweden) is designed by Sepidar Housseini and includes an essay by curator and writer Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten. In the book the artists present a selection of carefully sequenced works from recent years. From the ghostly, transcendental photographs in Family Portraits to the shiny sculptures in Sunset Photography, where panoramic photographs, the kind we all take and fill our phones with but seldom revisit, are used as raw material, stretched out and manipulated into sculptural forms.
Their book ‘The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth’ (2016, Kerber Verlag) revolve around performative photographic acts that can only be experienced through the photograph, an investigation into the act of taking a photograph and the camera’s role as a bridge between the physical world and the photographic. It was awarded the Swedish Book Art Award 2016 and nominated for The Swedish Photo Book Price 2018.
Their first book ‘Watching Humans Watching’ (2012, Kehrer Verlag) won the Swedish Photobook Price 2012 and were nominated for the German Photobook Price in 2013.
