What remains when a body leaves this earthly life? In a major solo exhibition featuring entirely new installations, Gunilla Klingberg reaches for the incomprehensible.

The butterfly species Kronärtsblåvinge (the large blue) was once native to the Kalmar region, but has not been seen since 2019. It is most likely extinct. In the exhibition Grief Trails Bright Phantoms in Its Wake at Kalmar konstmuseum, Gunilla Klingberg turns her attention to the vanished butterfly, and to the near impossibility of comprehending that a species is gone. Is it possible to sense absence and presence in something that no longer exists?

Gunilla Klingberg (b. 1966) is one of Sweden’s most influential artists. Her artistic practice explores movements in nature and the cosmos, and she is particularly known for large-scale public artworks, such as Virvelvind (2021) at Sergels torg in Stockholm and Vardagslivets mönster (2010) at Triangeln railway station in Malmö.

For Kalmar konstmuseum, Gunilla Klingberg has created entirely new site-specific installations that together form a poetic and fragmented composition in dialogue with the museum’s architecture. In the work Light and Darkness, a meaningful pattern emerges only after a moment of observation. In Grief Trails Bright Phantoms in Its Wake, which lends its title to the exhibition, the large blue butterfly, traces from the Ice Age and the lifelines of a handprint come together in a monumental installation in which the different elements break up the room’s large window section into a kind of musical score.

The exhibition also includes the work P U L S E (2024–2026). For this series, Gunilla Klingberg has scanned the insides of garments belonging to a deceased close relative, focusing on the points where the garments rested against the body’s pulse.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from artist Nick Cave and his forum The Red Hand Files, where questions of grief and loss recur.

 

Grief trails bright phantoms in its wake – Nick Cave
Image: Gunilla Klingberg, 2026
Sound design: Theodor Studio Klingberg Geschwind