Live at Moderna Museet: Gunnel Wåhlstrand

In the programme series Live at Moderna Museet, an artist is invited to talk about a work in the museum collection or a current exhibition. Often it is about their own work, but sometimes about another artist.

On Tuesday, 23 September 2025, the artist Gunnel Wåhlstrand will talk about her art and the ink wash “The Institute” (2005) in conversation with Ulf Eriksson, Curator of Learning Audio-Visual Media. The work is part of the Moderna Museet Collection and is currently shown in the exhibition “Yet Another Morning – Drawing in the Moderna Museet Collection”.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand creates monumental ink washes where memory, time and loss are recurring themes. Through painstaking and time-consuming work with brush and ink, she builds up detailed images with photographic precision – often based on private family photos from a time before her own birth. The result is low-key but magnificent works that raise questions about identity, distance and presence.

By reproducing photographs by hand, with precision and feeling, she brings both personal and collective stories to life. In the work “The Institute” (2005), we are transported in time and space to a bygone Gothenburg. But what kind of institute is it about and what can we ascertain from what we see in the image?

Gunnel Wåhlstrand

Gunnel Wåhlstrand was born in 1974 in Uppsala and currently lives and works in Stockholm. She studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and graduated in 2003. Her work has been shown at several major institutions in Sweden and internationally, such as Magasin III, Waldemarsudde, Gothenburg Museum of Art and Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Currently, her first solo exhibition in Finland is shown at the Turku Art Museum. She is represented in several public collections, including Moderna Museet.