Viktor Fordell (b. Stockholm, Sweden, 1990) lives and works in Stockholm. He holds a BFA from Konstfack University in Stockholm.
Solo and duo exhibitions include Placeholders (duo with Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw), Towards gallery, Toronto (2025); Basel Social Club, with Beau Travail, Basel (2025); More Diary at ISSUES (2023); The Garden with Nomad as part of GIBCA Extended, Gothenburg (2023); Seven days of flicker at MEGA Foundation, Stockholm (2023); Lineage at Simo Bacar Gallery, Lisbon (2023). Group exhibitions include Downtown Issues III at ISSUES, Stockholm (2025); Skulpturprojekte at Beau Travail, Stockholm (2024); Spectacle St. Bernard, Shellspace, Brussels (2024); DRAKEN II - Amaryllis in Vase with Coyote, Stockholm (2020); It’s A Long Way to Heaven at Tegel, Stockholm (2018); Solna Centrum at The Loon, Toronto (2018); Memory at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2016).
MELK is excited to present I’m finally over the moon, Viktor Fordell’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition opens on Friday, May 15, with a reception at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00.
‘I’m finally over the moon’ presents new bodies of works in photography and sculpture and, I would argue, is Viktor Fordell’s most personal exhibition to date. You might not see it at first glance, or even on the second or third, but that doesn’t mean it is not there. On the contrary, the apparent generalness of everyday life is precisely why it can also become personal. Fordell captured these droplets in Stockholm, where buildings, places, objects and people in his surroundings are reflected within them. Each droplet contains a myriad of information and layers, and depending on how he adjusts the focus, it either goes right through or just stays on the surface. The photographs are made under certain set conditions, a method of repetition and an arrangement where the droplets act as a lens but that does not equate with a fixed outcome as it is impossible to capture the same image again, even if you try. In that attentiveness, the droplet appears as its own a kind of sphere: it can open up and take on new forms or evade to capture anything at all.
In writing this text, the earthwork ‘Double Negative’, by Michael Heizer (1969) has been a continued companion of mine. There is a kindredness to Viktor’s works that I see. His new series of sculptures, ‘Untitled’, elicits a similar balance and tension within the space of what is not there; the layered gesture in the gap marks a density that can be felt more heavily. And it is absorbing to be on the perceiving end, to meet the repetitive sequence of the round shape, which continues back into the photography, as it is not only the object itself but the reflecting movement back that gets highlighted. It becomes a circular relationship — a double negative, if you will — between the body and the work, a feeling that exists in passing.
These multiplicities of seeing give Fordell’s works a pendular motion between abstraction and figuration at the same time. On a more poetic level, his body of work highlights humanity’s innate rumblings before the impermanence of life itself. Life is both as vast and small as the microcosm of the tiny droplet we see before us. After all, Viktor Fordell’s photography is deeply romantic in its layer of universalism. The beauty in the abstract depiction of his motifs is the cumulative effect of him finding his own visual language.
— Maria Elena Guerra Aredal
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