Nathalia Edenmont
“My goal is always a masterpiece.”
The first thing one needs to remember when visiting Nathalia Edenmont at her home in the fashionable Östermalm district of Stockholm is to keep a long way away from the tens of thousands of butterflies with which she shares her space. Best not to get too close. (The butterflies are not, in fact, alive.) But they are to be found almost everywhere in her spacious and tidy apartment, carefully kept in boxes.
Visitors have to be very careful not to trip over the wrong box. Particularly as the butterflies are both expensive and difficult to get hold of. Nathalia has often travelled far and wide and has used all her skill and cunning to persuade a reluctant collector to sell her a specific sample. It’s difficult to say no to Nathalia Edenmont!
While she was growing up in the Black Sea city of Yalta on the Crimean peninsula art showed its artful face. As a child her mother took her to visit museums and it was not long before she started attending art school aged only 10, first in Yalta and later in Kiev. But it was some considerable time later that the idea of calling herself an artist matured. After ending up in Sweden more or less by accident, and after finding Stockholm quite agreeable, she had the idea of working as an art director for an advertising agency or design office. During the two years that she studied graphic design at Forsbergs in Stockholm she gained considerable recognition at the school. The demanding environment of the school meant that she had to rely on her instincts even if the results were very different from those of her fellow students. For example, Nathalia invented a font based on two dead snakes and some knives.
“One guy rushed out of the classroom when I took the snakes out of my pockets.” But the world of advertising and design was to prove too narrow for her; which was fortunate. “The industry did not suit me, but the atmosphere at the school made me dare to do things and to feel that it was OK to be different. Initially, everyone laughed at me, but by the end no one was laughing. Not any more.”
“To the Police. In my apartment there are butterflies, but no protected species. And so I request you to be very careful with the material here, both loose butterflies and also mounted originals that have taken about 500 hours of work apart from the cost of the material, so any damage will be extremely costly.”
This is the message on a laminated card taped to the floor that immediately gains the attention of visitors. It is intended as security in case of a raid by the police (there was one in 2012 when there was a hunt for protected species of butterflies; an experience that Nathalia describes as invasive and highly disagreeable). Indeed, to claim that Nathalia Edenmont’s art has given rise to strong reactions would be an understatement. Ever since her début with Still Life at the Wetterling Gallery in 2003 her art has stunned collectors, confused critics and caused newspaper readers to choke on their breakfast coffee. To such an extraordinary extent that her life has been threatened, one of her exhibitions was destroyed by Nazi youths and, last but not least, she was subjected to a police raid.
“I’m always prepared for the police to search my apartment for a second time. If the police turn up I don’t want them to be careless and destroy my work”, Nathalia explained on Swedish television.
As is so often the case with art, Nathalia’s work affects one more profoundly the more information one has about it. Her creations take us on a stupefying journey to a world that is as beautiful and perfect as it is perplexing and horrifying. Death is ever present in the form of fascination; not least a fear of death and many of her works allude to traumatic events in her childhood. In answer to the somewhat banal question as to where she gets her inspiration from she explains that that is not the way that it works.
“Not events. Not anything. Perhaps my need to create certain images comes, rather, from more physical events; that I can’t have children, that my parents died, but I wouldn’t call it inspiration. It’s more like therapy.” Perhaps one can discern a more general stylistic inspiration in Russian iconography and in vanitas paintings, though the images always come to Nathalia like a bolt from the blue, crystal clear and ready to be given physical wings.
But her search for perfection makes great demands on how the work is executed. Sometimes it can take up to ten hours to take a single photographic image in spite of the fact that she has the assistance of ten of the country’s best stylists, photographers and assistants.
“My goal is always a masterpiece”, she calmly claims. She does not manipulate her pictures afterwards. When she produced her first images things were very different. At that time, every image cost only some hundreds of SEK compared with a day of shooting that can cost up to 120 000 SEK today. Sometimes the result is a finished picture and sometimes not. Nathalia herself pays the bills and takes the risks.
Her apartment works double shifts both assomewhere to live and a studio.
“Many artists prefer to ‘travel to work’, but for me work is always on the go. And I am totally manic.” A lengthy start-up time is compensated by even longer work shifts. Sometimes the hall door remains shut for several days in a row. When she gets into a good flow there is always a risk that meeting other people will endanger the entire situation.
“Everyone radiates energy. Good, bad, exciting — it does not matter what. If another person’s energy comes in I take notice of this and my own energyleaks out.”
But what of other impressions, for example the wild mix of her own works and those of infiltrators with the common denominator that the majority of them are fairly large? Her own first purchase came as just as much a surprise to Nathalia as to the other people in the room.
“I paid a visit to Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ studio with the Wetterling Gallery and masses of art collectors and something misfired in my head. I’m not really very interested in other artists’ work, but something happened and I managed to exclaim ‘I’ll buy it!’ before anyone else got around to saying anything. Everyone was shocked.” And so it went on. After this first taste it became all the more important to have an apartment with many walls as a contrast to the empty walls of her childhood — an observation that seems to correlate with much else in Nathalia’s life. For Nathalia too, her childhood has set the tone for many aspects of her life; not least for her art. When many of her works have been dismissed as attention seeking, one can point to the critics’ lack of background as the culprit of the story. All her works, without exception, derive from her own experiences and a difficult childhood. At fourteen Nathalia became an orphan, left to try and survive in the Soviet Union at a time when much was forbidden.
As with so many other artists, criticism has followed Nathalia. Her images are recurrently criticized for being too perfect — so that as a beholder one has difficulty in getting close to them. But is it maybe the other way around? That the beauty of her perfect renditions could be claimed to be a bridge to a more abstract place that is broader and more open to the beholder’s own interpretation and projection than an imperfect composition whose sole aim is to provoke.
Nathalia Edenmont may have provoked a lot of people but, as she says herself: “I have never set out to provoke people.” Can it be the case that it is precisely the beauty of her works that links Nathalia’s own artistic therapy and her own experiences with my own personal experiences; the link between beholder and artist? But, regardless of how one chooses to interpret her art, one thing is certain: Nathalia has a liberating lack of interest in what we who behold her art actually think about her works, or how we choose to inter-pret them. When I ask her what she really wants to achieve with her art the answer comes instantly andspontaneously:
“Nothing at all. I have intuitive images in my head and I need to let them out and give them life.”
Text: Arvid Nittve
Photo: Patrik Sehlstedt
Idea & Production: Le Bureau
© Wetterling Gallery
About It’s mine
It is in the meeting of minds that art becomes important. These narratives are about initial meetings. About desire, passion, acquisitiveness. About the relationship between works of art and their owners.
It’s mine is a book that features encounters with 33 art collectors and artists who have opened their homes and their heart for us.
To get a copy of the book, contact info@wetterlinggallery.com.
