Scholarship Exhibition
May 7 - May 23, 2026
Opening Thursday, May 7, 5 - 7 p.m.
William Jernberg (born 1999, active in Örebro) was educated at Umeå Art Academy. In 2023, he was awarded the Thinking Hand scholarship. In 2024, he received the gallery’s art society, Konstsällskapet Våga Se's, large art scholarship. He received 10,000 SEK as well as this solo exhibition.
“The afternoon passes quickly. That is when I am most inside the pictures. Suddenly I have to sleep! But some afternoons may remain in the paintings.
I discovered oil pastels in the winter of 2022. The studio was too cold and I had to sit in the kitchen and work. Then I needed to find something less messy than oil paint. Eventually, I found my footing in the oil pastels which helped me think and see in a different way.
It is the sight that is at stake for me and that I try to explore. I partly think of my painting as a kind of eye examination. Not the optician’s eye examination, which looks at the sight in the eye. With pictures, I seek the sight through the eye. The sight that perhaps would be completely incomprehensible to me without painting as a tool and sounding board.
The motifs appear in different ways, often halfway through the process. The people or animals appear without any obvious purpose. I believe they mainly inhabit the paintings as compositional elements or as a response to an impulse that arises in the work with an image. I do not always know what they are doing there. But I have noticed that they possess charges that in some cases become decisive for whether the paintings say something or not.”
- William Jernberg
William Jernberg, Night Animal, oil pastel on canvas, 27 x 30 cm