Gallery 01:16

The Large in the Small For most people, their own experience equals reality, but we don’t really know how others see life. Where one person sees chaos, another sees order; what may seem insignificant turns out to be highly complex. Can an image convey what is hidden at first glance? Hilma af Klint believed that the invisible aspects of the universe were as real as the visible, and that her works, whether abstract or naturalistic, reflected the true essence of what she was depicting. In the land artwork Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson used an excavator and basalt boulders to draw a vast logarithmic spiral on a dry lake bed. Curve by curve, the spiral grows, echoing the same shape found in a seashell and the arms of the Milky Way. In the dialogue between microcosm and macrocosm, we see how every small part of the world reflects the larger whole. Sometimes drawing itself can function as a ritual or a method of exploring external and internal realities. JO Mallander’s four-metre-long work is made up of impressions created by his meditative and concentrated repetition of the same hand movement. The drawing becomes a trace of an action, in which the body serves as a channel that connects the material with the spiritual.