Bio  

‍Paula Tove Maria Alderin (b. 1971) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, holding a Postmaster’s in Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2023) and a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen (2000). 

Themes and imagery central to her practice are other realms, other modalities of reality, and liminal spaces—seen through the narratives of consciousness, belief structures, and metaphysics. She examines the transient, through personally or historically charged materials, informed by the materiality itself, as a physical substance or as a container of ideas and notions. Drawing from her own experiences with altered states of consciousness and realities beyond the apparent, her work explores boundaries of space and concept—engaging with events and phantasms that elude human understanding. Delves into the ambiguity of the existing and the insisting. 

“What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” (Harald Rosenberg, The American Action Painters, ARTnews, 1952). 

Her work often involves performative actions, using her own body, data, or gestures, in an act that seeks to move from what is seen to what is happening. Similarly, her horizontal way of working denies the gaze from controlling reality. Through various acts and iterations—detonations, blowing dust, molding, liquefying—surrendering herself, she poses questions about the nature of reality and explores materiality to forge new imaginaries. In an interplay between the intelligible and the obscure, the withering and the vibrant, the remnants and the lamented, her actions take form in formation, free from intentionality, becoming itself a thing and not a representation of a thing. 

“What remains after an act has ended? What are the obligations of a witness to an act that is over? These questions are thoroughly theatrical and performative, but they are also intimate and ethical” (Peggy Phelan, Lessons in Blindness,PMLA, 2004).                                                                                    
She uses her canvas as an arena on which to act—subjects herself to the act of waiting, to begin to see, what appears in the quiet of the space. It may seem abstract, but each gesture draws a scenario — a place for being and becoming, a space to take risks. Regardless of the medium Paula Tove Maria Alderin employs, she brings together timeless, existential themes intangible form. Her work is shown as material and immaterial explorations, encompassing installations, sculptures, paintings, light works, and text.