Denise Grünstein

For more than four decades, Denise Grünstein (1950-2023) was one of our most internationally renowned photographers. Born in Helsinki, she was active in Sweden throughout her life. In the 1980s, Grünstein became known for her portraits of cultural figures for magazines such as Elle and Månadsjournalen. She started styling her subjects to bring out other sides of the celebrities, as a kind of artistic dimension to the classic commissioned portrait. Her skill earned her so many commissions that she eventually grew tired of faces and decided to take a different photographic route. Her work often shows landscapes with women in different positions and situations, often hidden or facing away from the camera. It is the composition that comes first for Grünstein, to test an idea and see if it holds up aesthetically, photography is really something she does to immortalize the composition. Grünstein prefers to use natural light and is known for her soft, gentle images. However, when working on her 2009 series 'Figure Out', she had to challenge herself. The series refers to an art-historically charged landscape, the sea and the beaches of Skagen, motifs that have historically appeared in the works of many of the most famous Scandinavian male painters.
"We went down to some beaches that I imagined would be misty and romantic, but it was bright sunlight and bright blue skies - some kind of 'wing travel' environment. I encountered a light that I would never use, but needed to make mine. And it was interesting. It was needed - I felt that I can't always just keep doing my misty landscapes. This straight hard light was very exciting for me, but I would never have been able to come up with it myself. I would have just said 'ugh, no, no way'.
In Figure Out's surreal, dreamlike staging, the viewer encounters a figure hiding in hair in an enigmatic and elusive way. Hair for the face, lying over a table, cut off hair samples, but all sunlit and surrealistically playful. Grünstein worked here with a traditional large format camera and negative color film to achieve maximum detail.

The exhibition 'Figure Out', first shown at Galleri Charlotte Lund in Stockholm in 2009, consisted of ten large-scale color photographs and the video work 'All flesh is grass', also on the theme of hair. The series of images features performance artist Marta Oldenburg, the model with whom Denise Grünstein has now collaborated for over 20 years.

At the Artipelag art gallery, a memorial exhibition opened on October 14 and is still ongoing. It is entitled "Eftermäle" (Legacy) in an attempt to portray what Grünstein has meant to Swedish photography. The exhibition traces her career from the 1980s to her last major artistic project 'Nymphaeas' in 2021.
Denise Grünstein's work will live on for a long time to come, including in the collections of Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, KIASMA in Helsinki and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo.

Quote Kamera & Bild, Elin Parmhed, September 2013.