Adèle Essle Zeiss

The Bærtling Scholarship 2025

“It’s a freedom – an encouragement to continue”

Adèle Essle Zeiss is awarded the 2025 Bærtling Scholarship at Bonniers Konsthall. At Bonniers Konsthall, the Bærtling Scholarship was awarded – one of Sweden’s largest art scholarships. This year’s recipient is artist Adèle Essle Zeiss, recognized for her exploration of the body’s relationship to space, balance, and gravity.

– It’s a wonderful encouragement to continue working in the same direction, she says. Essle Zeiss began as a dancer before training in art – something that clearly influences her work.

– I’m quite free from traditions. I search for a strong presence or concentration in the space, something that feels alive.

Around 40 guests attended the ceremony at Bonniers Konsthall. In addition to the award presentation, Sofia Wiberg, researcher at KTH, gave a speech about “the uncertain” and how art and urban planning can meet through new forms of knowledge.

– Adèle is a perfect grant recipient, says Wiberg. Her works are about collaboration, dependency, and trust – and about how we can’t always control everything.

In the jury’s motivation, Essle Zeiss’s ability to create constructions from beams, cables, weights, and counterweights that form fields of tension and activate both bodies and spaces is highlighted. Through pulleys and blocks, she challenges the law of gravity and transforms simple acts of balance into artistic expressions that unite principles of physics with poetic precision. The result is works experienced as both fragile and solid, temporary and enduring.

Behind Adele, a video work is playing, created together with Alexis Zeiss, where three people follow winds using constructions that make the body lighter.

– My works open up the body to the outside world in different ways and make it receptive to other bodies or forces that affect it, says Adele.

Her artistic practice also connects to several questions that were central to Olle Bærtling’s work – particularly his idea of sculpture as an activation of space. The jury suggests that Bærtling’s words about how material forms unite with immaterial space could just as well describe Adele Essle Zeiss’s installations.

– I’ve seen his works in public spaces and always felt a certain kinship, even though I haven’t thought much about his artistic practice before, she says in closing.

Adèle Essle Zeiss at Bonniers Konsthall after receiving the Bærtling Scholarship from executive board member Håkan Nilsson. Her art explores balance, movement, and the body’s relationship to space. Photo: Fredrik Redelius