A surface frozen in time: a Stockholm apartment furnished with the aspirational décor of the early

2010s, part third-generation Scandi minimalism, part globalised Pinterest aesthetic, forms the

backdrop for the group exhibition European renovation. Here, an intervention is staged amidst

brass hardware, wooden floors, and walls in muted Jotun Morgondis. Within this familiar setting,

now also pervaded by the unsettling feeling of the recently déclassé, the artworks appear both at

home and out of place. For some time, Scandinavian minimalism was able to hide within its own

desire to disappear – a style invented by a people who, above all, refuse suffering. An interior

style of interiority, so to speak, it is one that seeks to repress any sign of intensity. This domestic

space, both neutral and charged, and now abandoned by good taste, acts as a foil against which the

artworks press through various displacements and divergences.

Artist and culinary historian Charlotte Birnbaum turns to art de la table, or dukning. The

piece Knives Out, part readymade and part ritual of table setting, offers an object of old-world

grandeur, with a layering of knives and baroque serving plateaux. Attention is drawn to the hand

that styles and the hand that assembles displays, while teasing out unconscious undercurrents in

the performative tablescaping practices of contemporary, algorithm-driven foodie culture.

Lina Kruopytė’s sculptures, appearing as oversized colour swatches, may at first sight seem

structurally minimalist (the art variety), cultivated through a lineage of minimalism passed down

from someone like Anne Truitt. Yet the sculptures Verticality No. 1 (Nobile, Sunkissed, Peach Sky,

Keisergul, 2025) and Verticality No. 2 (Sonoma Oak, Birch, Santana Oak, Sanremo Oak, Sheffield

Oak, 2025) also feature faux-wood laminate surfaces and color schemes reminiscent of the interior

style known as evroremont.

Short for “euro-renovation,” evroremont was an Eastern European renovation trend that emerged

in the 1990s, aspiring to an imagined Western aesthetic. A fantasy of Europeanness was assembled

from magazines, hotels, and IKEA catalogues, and realised through wood-effect veneer, peach-

coloured walls, spotlights, and ornamental restraint. This post-Soviet performance of modernity

smoothed over the structural instabilities (taste, class, ideology) that sustained it. By “returning”

these mis-imagined inheritances to Northern Europe, in a domestic setting that has itself become

anachronistic, Kruopytė’s sculptures introduce a pluralism of minimalisms.One of Katarina Sylvan’s

two pieces in the exhibition, titled Untitled Grid (2025), also appears to contribute to this layering

of minimalisms. Made from masking tape arranged in a grid, her wall work seemingly collapses

Sol LeWitt, Burberry, Mondrian, Merlin Carpenter, and a kitchen towel into a single image.

Or it could simply be what it appears to be: masking tape in a grid pattern on the wall.

Sanna Helena Berger’s Stil-leben (2025) is a two-part still life: a text for the wall and a film that

depicts a never-ending domestic scene. Seen in relation to the proliferation of female-coded

contemporary still lives produced through the logic of the photogenic, Berger’s still life, rather

than presenting stylised opulence, evokes the deeply mundane and the routines that reproduce it,

approaching still life both as a mental state and a material condition.

The notion of upholding is also present in Alina Chaiderov’s The Still Point (2025), in which a

minimal steel structure holds two dead branches in balance. The industrial-organic elements are

both stripped of their original functions and fused together in a state of suspended transformation.

Tora Schultz’ Appendix (2025) consists of a burned diary turned bronze sculpture for the wall,

where none of its pages – only the lock – made it through the fire of the casting process. The lock

still performs its job in keeping the secrets safe.

If Schultz’s work preserves, or erases, private memory through material transformation, Lisa

Tan’s One Night Stand (Paris) (2006) explores the ways we internalise image culture. Produced

while roaming the city of Paris alone past midnight for twenty-four hours, Tan’s 22-minute silent,

imageless video consists of a black screen and subtitles based on her nighttime notes. Even for

viewers without first-hand experience of Paris, the city resides in what Tan calls, via Félix

González-Torres, our “blood memory”: a kind of knowing not derived from physically inhabiting

a space, but from the inheritance of innumerable representations. In the case of Paris, this can

famously manifest as the acute condition known as Paris Syndrome – a delusional state of

disorientation upon discovering the disparity between image and reality.

By layering the Scandinavian apartment, enhancing and troubling its silent allure, European

renovation also brings forth a point of collision. Poet Lisa Robertson once wrote that “glamour is

the true subject of the idea.” The exhibition appears to take a dual position in relation to this

claim: both as a critic of inherited style and of the styling of inheritances, while also heralding

their forms. Neither stance, it suggests, is sufficient on its own.

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– Marie-Alix Isdahl