Gerdman Gallery is pleased to present Potential, Josephine Thorsby’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first since graduating from the Royal Institute of Art (Kungl. Konsthögskolan), Stockholm, in 2026.
Thorsby explores anticipation as a space of transformation: a longing for something that has not yet happened, which holds both the possibility of movement and the risk of remaining still. In the studio, painting becomes a way of breaking this stillness. Anticipation is not necessarily fulfilled, but displaced and reshaped through the work.
Her sources range from digital images and cinematic landscapes to historical textiles and staged atmospheres. Through a slow, manual process they are enlarged, dissolved, repeated and altered. The relationship between an image and what it depicts shifts: the familiar becomes strange, and the imagined takes on a physical presence.
In Potential, Thorsby’s interest shifts from the images themselves to the feelings and ideas they leave behind. What remains when the image has been transformed, and at what point does the potential begin to feel real?
Gerdman Gallery is pleased to present Potential, Josephine Thorsby’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first since graduating from the Royal Institute of Art (Kungl. Konsthögskolan), Stockholm, in 2026.
Thorsby explores anticipation as a space of transformation: a longing for something that has not yet happened, which holds both the possibility of movement and the risk of remaining still. In the studio, painting becomes a way of breaking this stillness. Anticipation is not necessarily fulfilled, but displaced and reshaped through the work.
Her sources range from digital images and cinematic landscapes to historical textiles and staged atmospheres. Through a slow, manual process they are enlarged, dissolved, repeated and altered. The relationship between an image and what it depicts shifts: the familiar becomes strange, and the imagined takes on a physical presence.
Daily manifestations of Main Character Energy, the encouragement to think about who you want to be rather than who you already are, and the need to shape our dream lives, having been told that we can become anything, fill my algorithm with material possessions. And yet, I often have the feeling of merely being a spectator to my own life.
The miniature worlds contained in my pocket reveal themselves as endless, while I step out the door and perceive the street as my catwalk. The images on the screen are close, I zoom in to get even closer, but never quite reach them. As I walk, heels barely touching the pavement, these images shape the way I see myself, my surroundings, and the lives I could be living.
- Josephine Thorsby
This longing for what might be is nothing new. It belongs neither to Generation Z nor to the zeitgeist alone: the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it into words almost two hundred years ago. The feeling may now seem bound up with technology, but technology has always shaped what each era believed was possible. Today’s screens and algorithms trace back, in part, to Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s weaving loom of 1801, whose punch cards were later borrowed for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Ada Lovelace set out its possibilities in her notes of 1843 - the same year Kierkegaard published Either/Or. Innovation is still presented as a way of expanding what we can become, yet potential already existed within a system: from punch cards to curated displays on a digital screen. The connections between technological inventions and existential states are like threads woven into an embroidery, visible only to an eye willing to trace them.
In Potential, Thorsby’s interest shifts from the images themselves to the feelings and ideas they leave behind. What remains when the image has been transformed, and at what point does the potential begin to feel real?
