LISA LUNDGREN

 While we were here

Alzueta Gallery, Seneca, Barcelona 2026

LISA LUNDGREN

While We Were Here

I wanted not a window on the world
but the world itself.
I wanted everything in the picture.
- Joan Didion

Bringing the season to a close, Alzueta Gallery is pleased to present While We Were Here, a solo exhibition by Lisa Lundgren (Sweden, 1987) and the artist’s first presentation with the gallery. The exhibition will run from 9 to 30 July at Alzueta Gallery Barcelona Séneca.

Created during her residency at Alzueta Gallery in La Bisbal d’Empordà, the works in this exhibition introduce a brighter and more playful chapter in Lundgren’s practice. Pink skies, yellow suns, birds, stars, tents, rainbows, palm trees populate these paintings, unfolding across vividly coloured surfaces that seem to hover somewhere between dream, memory, and invention.

Lundgren’s paintings are immediately recognizable through their distinctive visual language and saturated palette. Using pigments, rabbit-skin glue, and thin layers of oil paint on raw cotton canvas, Lundgren creates images that feel at once direct and mysterious. The materiality of the surface remains present throughout, giving the paintings a luminous, tactile quality in which colour seems to emerge from within the fabric itself. Familiar motifs reappear from painting to painting, not as fixed symbols but as recurring characters within an open-ended visual world. A tent may suggest a circus, a temporary home, a stage, or simply a place to gather. Birds drift through the compositions as quiet companions, sheltered by bright skies full of stars.

The paintings emerged during a period of intense looking, living, and making in La Bisbal d’Empordà. During the residency, the artist’s daughter spent much of her time in the studio, and her presence gradually entered the work in ways that are difficult to pinpoint but clearly felt. A different tempo seems to take hold: the palette grows brighter and more radiant, the imagery more open, as if loosened by another way of seeing. Certain forms carry the echo and atmosphere of children’s drawings, immediate, unguarded, and intuitively ordered. Here the works become lighter, sometimes approaching a kind of naïveté, though never fully settling into it. They hold that in-between state where things feel newly seen. 

However, rather than resolving into narrative or nostalgia, Lundgren’s compositions stay open, moving between recognition and uncertainty: What are we seeing? What will happen next? In this space, play is not an effect but a way of looking, allowing the works to remain both precise and gently unsettled at once. 

Situated between dream and reality, these paintings continue Lundgren's exploration of what lies beyond the visible. Beneath their joyful surfaces lies an invitation to slow down, to linger and to enter, for a moment, a world governed not so much by certainty, but by attention, wonder, and quiet transformation.

Clara Beltran