Erik Thörnqvist, Natural Born Sitter

Installation view. Photo: Tinni Ernsjöö Rappe

Erik Thörnqvist received the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant in 2024. His works were exhibited in a duo-exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, together with the other 2024 grant recipient Anastasia Savinova.

By reshaping traditional objects, Erik Thörnqvist (b. 1994) gives them new symbolic meaning that express agency and freedom, beyond their original functions. Particularly interested in the role of ornamentation within modernism, he questions its place in designed environments and explores how these aesthetic expressions can create space for subversive interpretations and queer representation. Deliberately coded and ambiguous, Thörnqvist’s works resist easy interpretations and defy norms in a powerful way, engaging the viewer to confront social issues and creating new narratives where body and identity can be renegotiated and redefined.

Guest Jury for the Maria Bonnier Dahlin scholarship 2024 was Jacob Dahlgren and Fredrik Liew.

Jury's Motivation:

In Erik Thörnqvist's work, surfaces bend and warp, both literally and figuratively. Functional furniture, designed with the intent to support human bodies, stands up and walks—serving as a compelling testament to the idea that the absurd is inherent in the rational and only needs to be unleashed by a creative and open force that recognizes the seriousness within play. For some, modernism represented the ultimate form of a logical, structured, and normative order meant to aid and support humanity. But by whom, for whose body, and on whose terms? With a particular sensitivity to small details, Thörnqvist demonstrates a refinement in material and form compositions, which he combines with a conceptual rigor that firmly grounds his artistic expression, independent of descriptive or explanatory text.

Erik Thörnqvist (1994, Umeå, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Through sculpture and installation, Thörnqvist’s work delves into historical and fictional narratives to unearth how an idea takes a material form. The blurring of what is fixed or a collapse between fiction and fact is a point of departure in his practice. The work underscores this as a gradient of experiences and possibilities rather than polar opposites. Like taking a misstep or how the omission of narration leaves a space for something to be filled in.

Thörnqvist has previously exhibited at the 2020 Luleå Biennial Time on Earth, SOMA (Mexico City), Lunds Konsthall, Final Hot Desert (Salt Lake City), KIN Museum for Contemporary Art (Kiruna), Konstnärshuset, and Luleå Konsthall.

Installation views, Bonniers Konsthall. Photos: Jean-Baptiste Béranger. erikthornqvist.com