Larsen Warner is extremely pleased to present Utopia by Swedish based artists Cooper & Gorfer. Presented within our summer home for the gallery in Falsterbo, Sweden, the exhibition offers a wonderful opportunity to view highlights from their most recent body of work Between These Folded Walls, Utopia. The exhibition follows on from their recent critically acclaimed exhibition of the same name at Fotografiska, New York, the artists first institutional exhibition in the USA. Between These Folded Walls, Utopia will now travel from New York and open at Fotografiska, Stockholm in September 2021.

In a series of richly-imagined portraits, the artistic duo Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer explore the idea of Utopia in the age of the new diaspora. Young women who have been forced to uproot their lives are photographed like goddesses inside lustrous and surrealist-inspired sets. These vivid portraits are a judicious and of-the-moment examination of our historical memory and possibility. In their art, Cooper and Gorfer interweave reality and fiction. Based on the stories and lives of the women they portray, the artists reimagine the tradition of portraiture by deconstructing the narrative of their protagonists. Cooper & Gorfer’s works are not only startling in their beauty; on the contrary, replete with symbolism they speak about identity, feminism, heritage and the environment and experiences that shape us.

Sarah Cooper (b.1974, US) and Nina Gorfer (b.1979, Austria) have been collaborating since 2006 and work between Gothenburg, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Selected recent exhibitions include Between These Folded Walls, Utopia, Fotografiska New York, 2021; The Weather Diaries, Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Estonia (2020); Interruptions and The Weather Diaries, Rosphoto, St Petersburg, Russia (2018); Interruptions, Árran, Lulesamisk Senter, Drag, Norway (2018); A Queen Within, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art, USA (2018); I Know Not These My Hands/Interruptions, Strandverket Konsthall, Marstrand, Sweden (2018); The Weather Diaries, American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, USA (2017); I Know Not These My Hands, Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden (2017); The Weather Diaries, Nordic Heritage Museum, Seattle, USA, Danish Cultural Center, Beijing, China (2016); The Weather Diaries, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014). In 2018, Cooper & Gorfer were the winners of the prestigious German Photo Book award for their monograph I Know Not These My Hands.

“We felt drawn to a new diaspora, the young generation of women whose lives had been influenced by forced migration and a need for a new place to live. These are adolescents on the cusp of adulthood who have experienced what it means to uproot their reality and sense of self. Young women who grew up with different cultural understandings of the world. They are women in different stages of independence and gender equality and who, because of that, are less rigidly defined, less prone to accept a readymade understanding of the world.”
– Cooper & Gorfer