Linnéa Gad:
Peelings

Linnéa Gad, *If I Fell* (2025). Photo: David Schulze

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River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to present Peelings, an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Linnéa Gad installed within the landscape that surrounds the Al Held Foundation studio complex. The project is curated by Alyson Baker and organized as part of RVAC’s annual On the Grounds series.

For this exhibition, Gad has created a series of installations consisting of ceramic forms suspended in the landscape. With glaze and slip colors ranging from bright, warm yellows to the amber hues of tree resin and the acidy greens of lichen, they glimmer in their lush, leafy surroundings. Placed on existing structures and trees, or held aloft by sinuous wire armatures, each component is in conversation with its counterparts, and the artist’s source material within the surrounding woods.

In late winter, Gad collected the shedding skins of maple, pine, birch and ash trees from the thawing ground and brushed them with layer upon layer of ceramic slip until a thick clay crust built up around them. When they were fired, the woody interior burned away and the forms shrank and hardened into shells - sometimes splitting open to reveal the texture of the bark.

Gad’s work is born of curiosity, close observation, and careful research into the environment around her – she is inspired by the geological, material, and ecological processes that form the ecosystems she occupies. In response to the devastation caused by the emerald ash borer beetle and the stripping of hemlock trees that has forever changed the mountainsides of the Catskills, she is keenly attuned to the forces that inform her collaboration with the natural materials she draws into her studio practice.

I consider my works to be artworks, but in the broader context, they’re just materials passing through on their journey elsewhere. I often imagine their future in geological time: how they might decompose, disappear, or transform.

— Linnéa Gad, Bomb Magazine interview with Rita Bullwinkel

LINNÉA GAD is a Hudson Valley based visual artist from Stockholm, Sweden who works in sculpture, painting, performance and writing. Gad received her MFA from Columbia University in 2022. Her solo shows include Return of The Mollusk at Astor Weeks in New York (2024), Erratics at Spencer Brownstone in New York (2019) and Luster Pit at RØM in Copenhagen (2018). She has participated in group shows at The Jewish Museum in New York (2022), The Lenfest Center for the Arts in New York (2021) and SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen (2021). She has recently exhibited at Ceysson Bénétière in New York, Beau Travail in Stockholm, Half Gallery in New York and Issues Gallery in Stockholm. In 2023, Gad presented her first public artwork, Shoals, two large-scale sculptures installed in Nolan Park on Governors Island in collaboration with the Billion Oyster Project. She is the recipient of multiple grants from The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and was shortlisted for the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards in 2022.

Over the past five years, River Valley Arts Collective has partnered with the Al Held Foundation to present exhibitions in Held’s former drawing studio, outdoor installations on the foundation's grounds and, more recently, performances in Held’s painting studio.