The gallery is pleased to present Yours to Keep, a solo exhibition by J.G.Arvidsson. This exhibition marks J.G.Arvidsson’s first solo with the gallery.

J.G.Arvidsson’s practice investigates the nature and interrelation of memories, emotions and visualisations. People, often shown in profile or silhouette, feature prominently throughout J.G.Arvidsson’s work. Their presence is given without context, yet there is a warm sense of familiarity that emanates from them. They are set in hazy almost dream-like landscapes and other specific scenarios to point towards narratives that tug at something internally.

The resulting sense of purposeful—yet delicately subtle—ambiguity is echoed in J.G.Arvidsson’s use of techniques. Paint, canvas and oil stick among a variety of other media overlap on pieces of found and up-cycled wood. Applied thickly and scratched off in places, the layers, the seams and the physical processes of the work are left deliberately exposed. The result is an incredibly expansive depth of both material and narrative.

J.G.Arvidsson’s motives point to the untenable ways in which we create and maintain our memories and our connections to our pasts, our selves and our day-to-day.

In Yours to Keep, J.G.Arvidsson focuses on the first chapter of his life—the first three years in Ethiopia, and the beginning of his life in Sweden. The works are not all referential, but they speak to the people, places, feelings and memories that evoke this period in time. A self-portrait, the silhouette of his mother, a scene from the children’s home, a scene from an embassy. We are invited in in a way that does not feel voyeuristic, but rather welcoming.

There is an acceptance of the murky quality of these memories. They have faded due to the passage of time, yet somehow have also become stronger, more stripped back, more singular and intense. There is also an element of their nature which feels almost left to chance—for example, how you can’t remember if someone wore glasses but remember how they did their hair, or not remembering how your home looked like when you were a child, but remembering the colour of the front door. These stripped down memories become touchstones, with their sparse details immediately bringing us back to something engrained deep within us.

In this sense, it is not necessary for us to know whom or what J.G.Arvidsson is showing us, and his connection to each work. Rather, they provide us a space through which his paintings are a means for us to engage with these ideas at our own pace, and with the added layer of our own lives and ways of understanding.

J.G.Arvidsson (b. 1989, Ethiopia) lives and works in Copenhagen. J.G.Arvidsson graduated with his Master of Fine Art at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art’s School of Painting in June 2023. This marks the gallery’s first solo exhibition with J.G.Arvidsson.