Nathalia Edenmont

Edenmont does not photograph in any conventional sense. Each image begins months or years earlier - as an obsessively hand-assembled collage of butterfly wings, pressed flowers, vegetables, or live beetles arranged into sculptural costumes worn by her models. She shoots with a large-format analogue Sinar camera, working with a team of up to twelve people over ten to twelve hours per image. The final photograph is not a document of a scene but the culmination of a slow, painstaking construction. 'I paint with a photographic lens,' she has said, and the description is apt: the scale, the saturation, and the tactile density of her prints feel closer to painting than to photography.

Thematically, her work circles birth, death, desire, and decay. Early series used dead mice and severed animal parts staged inside floral arrangements, provocations that generated both controversy and serious critical attention. Later bodies of work, including 'Force of Nature' and the butterfly collage series, shifted toward a more lyrical register without losing the underlying unease. The butterfly wing works alone take up to three years to complete - tens of thousands of iridescent wings arranged by hand before a single frame is exposed.

Her exhibitions have spanned London, New York, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow. Solo museum presentations in the United States include venues such as the Arkansas Art Center, the Flint Institute of Arts, the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and the Stamford Museum and Nature Center. European museum appearances include Backfabrik in Berlin and the Institut suédois in Paris. She has been twice awarded the Konstnärsnämndens Arbetsstipendium from the Swedish Culture Department, and her work is held in permanent collections at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Moscow House of Photography, Borås Konstmuseum, Kristinehamns konstmuseum, and the 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, among others.

On the Nordic auction market, Edenmont's work appears regularly at Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk, the two houses that account for the majority of her 11 recorded auction appearances in the Auctionist database. Photography and painting-adjacent photographic works represent the full range of her secondary market presence. Prices for large-format editions have ranged around 30,000 SEK at Bukowskis, with estimates sometimes set higher, suggesting a market that values the work but has yet to fully price in its institutional standing.