Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present Ergosphere, an exhibition of new works by Stockholm-based artist, Paul Fägerskiöld. This marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. On view from September 9, 2026, with an artist reception from 6 – 8 pm, it runs through October 31, 2026 at 176 Grand St, New York, NY.
The title of the exhibition, Ergosphere, refers to the region surrounding a rotating black hole where space-time itself is dragged to such an extent that physical stillness is impossible. Within this zone, every observer is set in inescapable motion—a physical phenomenon that Fägerskiöld mirrors in the gallery, utilizing its half-spiral architecture to transform a sequence of rooms into a gravitational orbit. The new paintings aim to loosen the viewer’s cognitive and physical footholds, raising central inquiries that have preoccupied the artist: What would it be like to be an easel-painter at the edge of a black hole? How does one observe the world from five-dimensions, only to translate it onto a two-dimensional surface?
The progression through the exhibition begins with a deliberate gateway—a small, dark blue painting depicting the nearest black hole seen from New York City. Functioning like a simple door opening into a vast, expansive space, this canvas provides the viewer's sole earthly foothold before balance is suspended and the traditional horizon line vanishes, carrying away with it gravity, orientation, and natural scale.
The Starry Night style paintings, presented on raw linen with empty borders, portray cosmic regions as viewed from our solar system, centering on invisible gravity sources at their core, black holes. These works are constructed through an intensive process of layering, beginning with four to five coats of acrylic followed by four to five layers of oil applied from lighter to darker tones. Throughout this process, Fägerskiöld rotates the canvas in all directions so that conflicting brushstrokes build a textured, living surface.
The artist utilizes bright, unnaturalistic colors that appear as playful shards surrounding unpainted stars. By excluding the horizon and leaving raw linen exposed, the canvas is simultaneously flattened into an absolute surface while opening an infinite, ungrounded depth. These paintings’ titles, such as View from the Solar System towards the black hole M87 (55 million light years). January 1, 100,000., act as temporal coordinates projecting deep into a future that mathematically aligns with the light-years separating us from these celestial bodies.
In contrast, Fägerskiöld’s other style of paintings are frameless, featuring multi-layered, tinted linen grounds and glossy, transparently drawn circular motifs where the lines of the backside show through to the front. To create these, the artist tints his priming medium with just one percent of transparent paint per layer, changing colors with each application to imbue the linen with an oil-like tonality while preserving the visible weave. By continuously redrawing the motif with each priming layer, he tightly weaves the drawing and ground together, compressing the physical distance between the image and the raw surface, creating an almost holographic quality.
The motifs in this series revolve around the geometry of the sphere, creating a formal bridge to the black hole paintings while continuing his exploration of scale and dimensional movement. He focuses on two primary forms: the sphere and the tree. The sphere is depicted transparently, causing the shape to visually warp, bend, and hover between volume and flatness. The tree motif functions as a visual contemplation of time and transformation. The colors appear between commonly defined tones, and in flux, opening the works to be less bound to references.
Underpinning the entire exhibition is the holographic principle, a cosmological theory suggesting that all the information within a three-dimensional system can be encoded without loss on its two-dimensional boundary. For Fägerskiöld, this is not only the physical condition of an observer at the event horizon, but the ultimate definition of painting itself: a flat surface holding the depth of an entire universe. These works push beyond visual boundaries, echoing Edwin Hubble’s observation that the history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. Ultimately, Ergosphere aims to collapse the boundary between the cosmic and the material.
Paul Fägerskiöld (b. 1982, Stockholm, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. He was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Solo museum exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Thun, Thun, Switzerland, (2021); Borås Art Museum, Borås, Sweden (2019); Jönköping läns Museum, Jönköping, Sweden (2018); Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö, Sweden (2013); and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2010); among others. Fägerskiöld’s work is in permanent collections including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; SEB Collection, Stockholm, Sweden; The Olbricht Collection, Berlin, Germany; Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Stavanger, Norway; Public Art Agency, Stockholm, Sweden; and Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden; among others. He has been awarded the Åke Andrén Foundation's Scholarship (2018); the Fredrik Roos Art Grant (2013); and the Maria Bonnier Dahlins Award for Young Artists (2010); among others.
For press inquiries, please contact Alejandro Jassan Studio at ale@alejassan.com or +1 (917) 257-1355. For all other inquiries, please contact Kyle Harris at kyle@peterblumgallery.com or +1 (212) 244-6055.