Summer Show

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

No season is more ridden with clichés than summer, and summer shows are rarely an exception, with their curious mix of pretty landscapes, still-life flower arrangements and portraits of famous people, elected by a jury of academy members (or famous people). Even for nineteenth century painter John Constable, known for his Romantic renderings of English country life, the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition represented

“the time of year when the devil comes and spews art over London.”

Subverting a traditional summer show, this exhibition brings together 40 artists whose work turns conventional aesthetics on its head, and locates a new kind of convulsive, rebellious beauty. It is a beauty that dares to reveal the grotesquery of fine art, makes no rigid distinctions between the digital and the “real”, and uncovers the dormant beauty of the vulgar and the popular. Here the normal rules of society are suspended,

so that other systems of meaning can emerge.

It is in such spirits that Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, has the pleasure of welcoming you to our most sinister summer show yet.