Yield to Touch brings together the practices of Adrian-Alicia Bisell Gonzalez and Bernhard Bratsberg, in an exhibition that examines how bodies negotiate space through vulnerability, resistance, and adaptation. Across painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition puts forward the body as a force that presses back against its surroundings: shaped by gravity, limitation, desire, and responsiveness. Touch, movement, and instability operate as connective threads, revealing how forms yield, sway, or even reconfigure space in response to presence. Rather than asserting fixed meanings or hierarchies, the works invite a heightened awareness of how bodies and environments meet: where control gives way to responsiveness, and where physical encounter becomes a site of transformation.
Their two practices follow closely aligned interrogations, while unfolding in diametrically different, almost oxymoronic, spatial frameworks: Bratsberg explores possibilities of spatial reconfiguration within the fixed constraints of the canvas, while Bisell Gonzalez extends spatial interventions into the larger architectural space, where both the seen and the unseen are joined to create each work.
Swedish artist Adrian-Alicia Bisell Gonzalez (b. 1998) works with an attentiveness to fragility - how bodies orient themselves toward desire, how gravity renders us subjects to the world, and how every step, for this very reason, requires resistance. Working primarily with sculpture and installation, they investigate the boundaries between bodies and the interior spaces their works move through. Installation becomes a way of claiming space: a familiar hierarchy is challenged - as the work enters the space to pierce through, alter, or even destroy the architecture it resides in. Rather than the body adapting to architecture, these gestures challenge the limits imposed by space, questioning where bodies and objects begin and end, how they extend outward, and how they direct the viewer’s gaze.
The steel sculptures in the exhibition loom and intrude, growing from ideas of invasiveness and adaptation. Their jointed, movable limbs continue to sway after contact, suggesting a life shaped by its surroundings. Referencing invasive species - organisms often displaced by human intervention and later expelled for threatening ecological balance - the sculptures occupy corners and peak atop walls, as if they have learned the architecture’s weaknesses. Shaping, here, is understood as a process of destruction and reconstruction: dismantling the world through sculpture and reassembling it from within, allowing objects to assert presence, vulnerability, and resistance in equal measure.
Norwegian artist Bernhard Bratsberg (b. 2000) turned to painting as a way of reconfiguring his relationship to the body, following a career-defining injury and a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. What began as a loss of physical certainty, developed into a sustained inquiry into the tension between bodily limitation and intention. His work explores how attention, memory, and sensation extend beyond the body’s immediate location, negotiating tensions between control and instability, presence and absence, authorship and surrender.
Bratsberg constructs compositions through the repeated rotation of the canvas. This process of spinning functions as a method of erasure; while erasure itself is a form of collage. Drawing from his immediate surroundings - notably, the industrial area of Årsta Partihallar, in which his studio is situated - these influences are layered into the work with each turn of the canvas. Before reaching their final form, the paintings pass through multiple distinct orientations, each contributing a visible or residual trace to the completed surface. This process allows for the works to resist singular readings and emphasizes them as physical, temporal objects. Figuration is drawn from bodily memory, art history, and revisionary processes of erasure and overlap. Recent works further emphasise the connection between the artist’s body and the artwork through hand-applied marks that document the choreography of making and register sensation directly onto the surface. Across Bratsberg’s practice, painting becomes a vessel for articulating what resists language: embodied knowledge, subliminal feeling, and the quiet intensity of lived experience.
