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HOLDERS
Saskia Neuman Gallery
09.11.2023 —16.12.2023

For HOLDERS, their first solo presentation at Saskia Neuman Gallery, Susanna Marcus Jablonski has taken the body of a central sculpture, Weeping Lion (2023), and extended it into an all-encompassing installation of newly created glass and ceramic works. Marcus Jablonski is a Stockholm-based artist whose sculptures, moving image works, and spatial installations skillfully combine fragile materials with found objects in an exquisite balancing act of near-abstraction.


In dialogue with Anders Årfelt, creator of the iconic Stockholm Lion, Marcus Jablonski has cast an identical version of this familiar public sculpture, with the addition that it now appears to be miraculously crying. The mechanism that creates these tears – pump, water tubes, industrial battery, cables, and canisters – stretches out from the lion’s interior into the room’s architecture, held in place by a number of handmade ceramic carriers.

HOLDERS presents the deconstruction of a readymade symbol and proposes that the symbolic figure can instead serve as a portrait of our own interconnectedness to the systems that support us, while at the same time dissimulating them.

In the final room, a large glass sculpture is suspended from the ceiling, gracefully hovering in the space. It brings to mind stained glass windows, or the wrought iron gates of stately homes and corrective institutions. Its ornamental forms speak of ancient alphabets, inviting the viewer to read between the lines of the evident and the ineffable. 

HOLDERS suggests a suspension of the dualisms inside and outside, before and after, fragility and strength, making tangible what takes place between them. Susanna Marcus Jablonski’s artworks offer a delicate understanding of the inadequacy of conceptual binaries to account for the complexity of life and its requirements.

– Karin Bähler Lavér