INTRODUCTION
Isabel Theselius is an artist who never does what you expect her to. Her art is made of motorcycle jackets and neon signs, of delicate drawings of disastrous fires. She once transformed her car into an art piece, drove it straight into the gallery, and left it with gleaming lights. Based in New York and Malmö, Sweden, she moves between cities and cultures. But in her work, she mainly resides in the outskirts, the subcultures, the shadows of the past—and even the realms of the supernatural.
But let’s not start there. Let’s start with a no. Or rather “No-no-no.” Imagine yourself back in the year 2017. Isabel Theselius is living in Los Angeles. In her studio she casts a perfectly human hand, cut at the wrist and placed upright. It’s a most convincing hand, with glossy red nails. You can see the veins running under the smooth skin, which softly creases as the fingers close to form a fist. Only the index finger remains pointing straight up in the air. It’s the universal sign when calling for attention or caution. But as you look closer you realise that the finger is moving slowly from side to side. The sculpture wags its finger in an endless, silent gesture of warning or reprimand. No-no-no. You cannot. You will not. You must not. You are not allowed. No-no-no.
So what to make of it? There is an interesting tension going on between the exquisiteness of the hand and the tenacity of its gesture. How can a finger so dainty, which moves so silently and discreetly, have such a powerful impact? It’s impossible to ignore the message. At the same time the hand seems exposed, almost vulnerable, left on its own on a shelf or a podium in the white cube of the gallery.
Is there also a hint of play or teasing? In the second I ask myself this, I’m aware of the question’s unwanted connotations and implicit insinuations. In 2017 the movement #MeToo spread across the United States and Europe. Thousands of girls and women stepped forward to bear witness to sexual abuse and harassment. By owning and sharing their stories they removed the shame from the victim and placed the guilt on the abuser. Since then, the testimonies just have kept on coming. No-no-no. As we know all too well by now, some men never take no for an answer.
For Isabel Theselius the sculpture came from a deeply personal place. The year before she had turned thirty. By now she had met her American husband, the artist Nathaniel Cummings-Lambert, and was expecting their first child. The pregnancy came with happiness but also a growing anxiety. How could she possibly learn to say no, the word every responsible mother must master? To raise a child safely, to teach them to navigate and interact with the world, you sometimes need to say no. Many artists excel in the art and crafts of subverting negations and prohibitions. In the forbidden, the taboo, the unspoken and repressed there’s often something hidden worth pursuing. But how to learn not to expand or cross the boundaries, but to enforce them yourself? To patiently insist that a no sometimes definitely means no. With this sculpture Theselius operates on both a personal and a political level. Questions of self-doubt and fundamental challenges of parenthood and human relations coincide with some of today’s pressing gender issues. While the hand most literally is pointing its finger, Theselius elegantly avoids spelling the message out. Instead the finger keeps on wagging. Persistent, alluring, almost hypnotizing. All the time continuing to say no.
When Isabel Theselius first arrived in California in 2011, she already had a bachelor’s degree from one of Sweden’s oldest art academies, Valand, founded in Gothenburg in 1865. From this windswept, rain-soaked metropolis of the Swedish west coast, she came to the peaceful suburbs of Orange County. A teacher’s recommendation had triggered her interest as well as the enticing aura of Los Angeles. In describing her encounter with the place she uses the idea of twins, a gap opening between the idea of the city you think you already know—from the tales spun by Hollywood, media, and popular culture—and the city itself. On the surface they look the same, but soon you realise they are nothing like each other. Nevertheless, the preconceived image keeps appearing at the places you go, like a mirage or doppelganger superimposing itself on the far more complex reality.
Among famous former students of the University of California, Irvine, you find the artist Chris Burden. However, more important for Theselius was the practice of another Irvine alumna, the artist Alexis Smith. In her collages, assemblages, and gallery installations, Smith explored themes such as popular culture, Hollywood stories, and the American transformational dream of success. Smith’s art is filled with humour and ironic wit, her work layered with multiple possible meanings.
Still, you might trace some affinities with Burden’s art in Theselius’s work. Burden, for instance, has repeatedly used cars as material. He not only chose to be crucified on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle in his legendary performance Trans-Fixed in 1974; just as Theselius, he also brought a car into the gallery space. In 2013, he let a bright yellow 1970s Porsche sports car hang suspended in the air, acting as a counterweight to a small meteor in a precarious balancing act.
Another Californian artist of the 1970s is Mike Kelley. Even though their practices are worlds apart, Theselius shares something of Kelley’s fearless transgressions of general concepts of good taste and prudence. Should I perhaps also mention her somewhat twisted sense of humour, indulgence in popular culture, and preoccupation with fictious and real catastrophes?
Back in Sweden Isabel Theselius is part of another context, situating her right in the heart of the country’s art and design scene. Her mother, Tamara de Laval, is a well-respected artist, known for her intricate paintings outlining a world of struggle and beauty, politics and violence, populated by girls and women. Her father, Jonas Theselius, is also an artist focusing on the interplay and associations of colour, form, and patterns. Her brother Ossian Theselius is an artist too, while her uncle Mats Theselius is one of Sweden’s most established furniture designers, celebrated for his conceptual approach. In short, in her homeland Isabel Theselius cannot escape the associations her surname carries. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she had to cross the Atlantic to find a way of her own to be an artist. Although in truth, she still brought her family with her, frequently using it as material in her art. In the intriguing stories she tells, her family members play the roles of muses, main characters, and accomplices.
In this line of work we find the video of her father painted as an Easter bunny, his resigned gaze and graying hair in stark contrast to the comic effect of the face paint. With the video Isabel Theselius recreated a childhood memory, when her father had fallen asleep on the couch after a birthday party. When he woke up he had to rush off to catch a train. He journeyed all the way home, oblivious of the face paint until he caught sight of himself in the mirror. In recreating this memory he also became the advertising face for Isabel Theselius’s 2017 exhibition Hokus Pokus in Lund. In her video work Marseille Soap, presented at the same show, Theselius films her grandmother sitting naked in the bathtub, blowing soap bubbles through an empty spool of thread. In both these works the thin line separating the everyday from the surreal becomes fuzzy. The pieces might also be seen as tributes to persons she portrays, revealing the relations of trust and intimacy between them.
Let’s take a moment to consider the giant thread spools, which Theselius made herself out of wood and provided to the audience to use as stools when the video was installed at the medieval space of Krognoshuset in Lund, a gallery run by a collective of artists in Theselius’s city of birth. The endeavour to extend the world of her art out into the gallery space is a recurring feature of her practice. But even when she creates an encompassing setting which her artworks and the audience can inhabit together, she seldom lets herself go head over heels. She always offers the spectator enough space to take a step back, to see the exhibition both as a whole and a composition of individual works, as if some of them convey such a multitude and density of meanings that they need a space of their own. While Theselius no doubt is a maximalist in some ways, she’s also a minimalist in other aspects.
In her habit of enlarging ordinary things, Isabel Theselius can be seen as part of a pop art tradition. Her gigantic thread spools, matchbooks, and garments not only evoke the playful mood of the American pop artist Claes Oldenburg but also feminist pop artists such as Marie-Louise Ekman and Moki Cherry. Like these pioneers from the Swedish underground scene, Theselius has a certain flair for the provocative, sometimes tinged with the psychedelic aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s counterculture. The huge motorcycle vest she made of faux black leather and decorated with embroidered patches and enlarged pins could be seen in relation to this. It will, however, prove difficult to fit the vest into any given context. There are several reasons why it’s called Larger than Life.
It’s time we met the wild one. For more than a decade this rebel has roamed Isabel Theselius’s art. He has occupied her mind as well as her studio and shows, a beloved ghost whose spirit she conjures with roaring engines, humour, and tenderness. As an artist Anders Bom Lindén (1958–2012) was one of a kind. If you ask around the cultural scene of southern Sweden, there are still stories to be heard about his boisterous personality and practice. Educated at the Malmö Art Academy in the end of the 1990s, he became Isabel Theselius’s stepfather when she was a young adult. BOM, as she calls him, had a passionate love for American motorcycle culture and a liberating view of contemporary art, revolting against any tradition and convention. Among his most outrageous art pieces is the motorbike he built, turning it into a naked woman’s body that he rode through the streets. Not only did this thunderous sculpture, oozing petrol fumes and playing with concepts of sexism and machoism, cause scandal among the Swedish art scene, clashing hard with the enlightened age of critical postmodernism, it also earned him appreciation from the local division of the motorcycle club Hells Angels. Becoming an artist herself, Isabel Theselius engaged in long discussions with BOM, whose free spirit and unconventional way of looking at life and art became a source both of lively debates and inspiration.
In 2012 Anders Bom Lindén sadly passed away, after a short period of illness. Two years later Isabel Theselius made her graduation show at UC Irvine into a celebration of his legacy. At the entrance visitors were greeted by a neon sign saying “Hej Angels!,” a slip-of-the-tongue expression BOM used when talking about Hells Angels. In Swedish the phrase translates to “Hello Angels,” giving an innocent, even amusing air to the notorious motorcycle club. Despite his lifelong obsession with American motor culture and Western movies, BOM never got to visit the U.S. By airbrushing the picture of his home in the Swedish countryside on her car and driving it around California, Arizona, and Nevada, Isabel Theselius found a way to bring him on the road trip he always dreamt of. Once inside the gallery her Toyota Challenger transformed from a performance work to an installation piece, its white body covered with the picturesque scene of BOM’s rural neighborhood painted in black.
BOM wasn’t the only Swedish artist who dedicated his work to American cars and motorcycles. For a Swedish audience both his and Theselius’s projects inevitably bring to mind the paintings and prints of John E Franzén (1942–2022). During his first trip to California in the late 1960s, Franzén painted the monumental picture Hells Angels of California. The dramatic composition shows the members of the club fixing their bikes while a woman lies naked on the dirt in the foreground, like discarded trash. Another woman, dressed only in her panties, is turning her back to the viewer, seemingly running away. It’s a raw, even offensive picture, totally devoid of any romanticizing shimmer. Yet it has captivated audiences as well as critics for decades, and is considered to be a crucial part of Sweden’s modern art history. Interestingly enough, Franzén some years later became the official portrait painter of the Swedish royal family. But most of all he is known for his hyper-realistic paintings of cars and motorcycles. Often, he depicts them in silent backstreets or desolate industrial areas of anonymous American cities, infusing his brushstrokes with a touch of melancholia.
For Isabel Theselius, themes and works often continue to live on, meandering into new ideas and projects. Ten years after BOM’s death, she honoured the love and sorrow he left in his wake with the memorial exhibition Hej Angels! Forever at Elephant Art Space, Los Angeles, in 2022. For the show, Theselius created the previously mentioned oversized copy of BOM’s motorcycle vest, calling it Larger than Life, as a tribute to his expansive way of being. By now her son Saffi had emerged as a new key figure in her art. Often portraying him as an infant superhero, she toys with the idea of Saffi reincarnating the wild energy of her stepfather. In the pictures Saffi is often shown riding extraordinary vehicles, fearlessly enjoying the fast speed and hazard. What’s at stake is nothing but magical thinking. By bringing forth the images of her son playing with danger, Theselius hopes to disarm the machinations of her imagination. Rather than giving in to the all-consuming anxiety of parental worry, she creates spells and talismans, diving headlong into the world of superstition.
Sometime later, Isabel Theselius engages both Saffi and her younger daughter Una as co-creators of a series of beautiful floral paintings. They were shown at the exhibition Sycamore Spells at Central Server Works in Los Angeles in 2023, together with a series of photorealistic drawings on sheer cotton fabric. Here, once again, her artworks turn into spells, as if by conjuring her fears she can prevent them from turning real. The series of drawings on textiles goes back to 2018. That summer no rain fell for months in Europe, leaving the fields dry and the livestock starving, while fire raged in the forests across the continent. In California the effects of climate change had been felt for years, the heat and drought making wildfires an ever-present threat. In 2017 vast areas of the state were ravaged by the hitherto most widespread fire in the region. In an attempt to free her Los Angeles neighbourhood Sycamore Grove, in Highland Park, from the looming disaster, Isabel Theselius carefully drew her neighbours’ houses as if already consumed by fire. Would she thereby manage to keep them safe? The following autumn a devastating fire left large parts of the Los Angeles area in soot-black ruins. But Sycamore Grove was spared.
I flirted with you all my life, Isabel Theselius calls her 2023 exhibition at the gallery Konstepidemin in Gothenburg. The title is inspired by a song by Vic Chesnutt, telling the story of his tangled relationship with death. In Theselius’s case, it’s all about fire. It seems to seep into her work at every turn. It’s reflected in the picture of the little child with his eyes wide open, innocence mixing with temptation of pyromania. Here too, the artwork acts like a spell. If you can summon it, you can tame it. Mastering the fire before it spreads, before the nightmare becomes real. Before history repeats itself. Well, that’s too late.
What you need to know is this: in the 1950s and 1960s the great-grandparents of Theselius’s husband owned a diner, lounge, and bowling alley in Detroit, Michigan. Now the Red Mill has risen once again from the ashes to haunt the world of Theselius’s art. When she started asking around, she found out that disaster struck not only once but twice. After the first fire broke out, the diner was rebuilt, the interior once more featuring the long bar, the spacious dining area, and the bowling alley decorated with accents of red. In Theselius’s neat drawings the Red Mill seems to materialize the vision of post-war America, coloured with the 1950s’ upbeat mood of consumer society, pop culture, and a future shining bright.
Following her husband’s grandmother deep into the memories of the family’s past, Isabel Theselius also went searching the archives, finding footage and news articles about the events at the Red Mill. The second fire started during the Detroit riots in 1967, the streets tumultuous with protests and civil unrest. This time the place burnt to the ground. However, the newspapers reporting the incident don’t mention any connection between the riots and the Red Mill’s unfortunate fate. Instead, they speculate about an accident. A match lit carelessly might have set fire to the newly glazed floor of the bowling alley. Is it a sign that one of the souvenirs found among the family’s treasures was a matchbook from the Red Mill?
With painstaking precision, Isabel Theselius enlarges the matchbook in a sculptural piece, invitingly placed on the gallery floor. Meanwhile, in her detailed drawings, the deserted place is engulfed in a sea of flames, blazing hot and eternal in a looped video, featuring a miniature model of the diner, set on fire. While the oh-so-nice interior threatens to melt into heaps of plastic and charred wood, it’s not only the ambition of a family business that goes up in smoke. Gone is the wishful thinking of a nostalgic past, the enchantment of the American dream ending up as toxic puddles on the blackened floor.
Still, Isabel Theselius’s art is on fire. It’s there in her relief sculptures, elegantly cast in resin. Their orange flames licking the walls of the gallery, translucent and entrancing like fire itself. Promising warmth and light, playing with danger and mayhem. So be it. There are more stories to tell and spells to cast. Fire, I will flirt with you all my life.
Carolina Söderholm
Images © 2026 Isabel Theselius.
