Utställning Emily Sundblad, Crayfish Theater
Emily Sundblad:
Crayfish Theater
20.08.2025 – 20.10.2025
Teatergrillen har historiskt varit en plats där konstnärer samlats och samtalat.
De senaste i raden som ställt ut på Teatergrillen är Astrid Sylwan, Hanna Zelleke Collin, Klara Kristalova, Trinidad Carrillo, Jens Fänge, Martin Gustavsson, Olle Borg, Jesper Nyrén, Stefan Otto, Anna Linderstam, Mikael Olsson, Torbjörn Johansson, Liselotte Watkins, Matthias van Arkel, Anneè Olofsson, Mandy El-Sayegh, Thomas Karlsson, och nu Emily Sundblad.
Emily Sundblad’s exhibition Crayfish Theater is co-organized with Stockholm’s iconic restaurant Teatergrillen, which celebrates its eightieth anniversary in 2025. A favored dining venue of Ingmar Bergman and closely tied to the nearby Royal Dramatic Theatre, Teatergrillen has long been a landmark in Sweden’s cultural life.
The exhibition presents eight paintings that contemplate Sweden’s beloved kräftskiva (crayfish party).
This annual August festivity—cracking shells, aquavit toasts, and drinking songs—marks summer’s waning days with communal joy and ritual. In Sundblad’s hands, the crayfish becomes muse, memory, and emblem of fleeting time, turning tradition into both subject and stage. The crayfish party becomes both a literal and metaphorical framework for the exhibition. Sundblad’s exploration delves into themes of tradition, collective memory, and the ephemeral nature of seasonal celebrations. By integrating these motifs, the show reflects not only on Swedish culinary culture, but also on the broader interplay between art, ritual, and social cohesion.
The exhibition unfolds in three movements, like acts in a play. In the first, Vampyr I (Embrace) and Vampyr II (Embrace) present figures locked in embrace, perhaps shadows of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) and Persona (1966)—two films where the boundaries between family, identity, and performance blur. Yet just as easily they might speak to other, more private dramas: the silent choreographies of intimacy, gestures charged with longing or estrangement, moments of closeness both tender and inscrutable, where affection blurs into enigma and the line between embrace and entanglement is never entirely clear.
The second group turns toward the stage: Pantalone, Isabella, and Pulcinella—three variations on the fragile glass clowns that already populate Teatergrillen, part of its peculiar décor and half-forgotten charm. Sundblad reimagines these figures as echoes of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Each one carries a plume of pink feathers—an irreverent nod to the crayfish feast, and a playful wink at theater’s mingling of tragedy and comedy. In doing so, she transforms the restaurant itself into a collaborator, drawing its history and objects into the performance of the exhibition.
The final act brims with exuberance: Kräftvampyr I, Kräftvampyr II, and Kräftparadiset
—three canvases where crayfish drift into dream, guiding Sundblad’s figures through surreal landscapes of collage and memory. Half-myth, half-masque, these works unravel into a world where revelry becomes ritual,
and ritual dissolves into vision.
By choosing Teatergrillen—neither white cube nor celebrated institution—Sundblad sidesteps solemnity. Instead, she roots her work in local tradition, in her own upbringing that included frequent visits to this very restaurant, and in the legendary place Teatergrillen holds within Stockholm’s artistic history. The exhibition becomes not only a display of paintings, but an act of remembrance, festivity, and life.
