This exhibition offers insight into how he moved from painting flowers and still lifes to colourful geometric compositions, from figuration through semi-abstraction (where real-world motifs gradually dissolve into form and colour) to pure abstraction. His art evokes both calm and curiosity, opening new ways of seeing the world. Carlstedt’s artistic evolution provides a unique window into how modernism took shape through line, colour and composition.
The exhibition title Everywhere, There Are Flowers is drawn from a quote by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954), a leading modernist and champion of liberating colour from form. The quote carries a sentiment that became central to abstract art, in which Carlstedt found his own voice. Art was no longer about depicting the object itself, but about conveying a feeling or essence as experienced through the artist’s gaze. For those who see the world as beautiful, beauty is found everywhere.
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
—Henri Matisse, Jazz, 1947
Carlstedt is considered one of Finland’s most important modernists—a trailblazer of early abstract painting in the country. Like many of his generation, he was initially trained in a figurative style, but his time in Paris exposed him early to abstract and non-figurative art. He was among the first Finnish painters to be influenced by concrete art, often characterised by simple, abstract visual forms. Carlstedt developed a distinctive style that fused Cubist approaches with concrete art.
The Cubist does not abandon the motif, but sees it differently.
—Birger Carlstedt
In the 1930s, Carlstedt adopted the methods of Analytical Cubism. He used still lifes as subjects and fragmented the pictorial surface using a pluralistic perspective—depicting the motif from several angles simultaneously. He described this process as involving a “memory dimension”, allowing him to portray a still life from multiple viewpoints in one painting—a simultaneously perceived reality.
Although his paintings in the 1940s still bore traces of figurative motifs, Carlstedt viewed them as abstract. He believed they were created in the same way as music. What mattered in the artwork was not what was depicted, but how. Deeply interested in modern music, particularly the compositions of Ernst Pingoud, Carlstedt often compared his method of building a painting to that of a composer crafting a classical piece, with harmonies and tonalities.
This exhibition is curated in collaboration with curator Timo Valjakka (FI) and organised in partnership with Amos Rex in Helsinki.