Vårsalongen, “The Spring Salon”, is an annual art event where anyone in Sweden can send in their works to be considered for inclusion. The result is always eclectic and varied. The works range from paintings, drawings and sculpture to video installations, and more. This year all the works can be seen online.

I was happy to see quite a few pieces of textile art, even though I didn’t particularly like any one of them. Another memorable works this year was Vintern 2021/22 by Mårten the dog, which consisted of all the gloves and mittens that the artist had carried home from his walks during one season.

Ingrid is a budding artist and it wasn’t hard to convince her to come with us, and Eric is always up for art exhibitions. Adrian was perhaps a bit less enthusiastic, but I was pretty sure even he would enjoy it. The exhibition is so democratic and relatable – there’s even a “Young Spring Salon” section for sixteen to eighteen-year-olds – that there’s always something for everyone.

Predictably, Adrian enjoyed the sculptures the most. When given a choice, he always prefers to work three-dimensionally, whether with paper or clay or Legos.

Liljevalchs was recently expanded and now has several new galleries which I hadn’t visited before. The upstairs ones had amazing ceilings.

Those galleries currently exhibited works by Jockum Nordström, whose graphical works I didn’t find particularly interesting. But his mobile sculptures were nice: agglomerations of objects and pieces of wood, with a weight attached to a rotating arm of metal wire, and something noise-making for that weight to hit on each pass around the circle: a zither, or a broken violin, or a bicycle bell.

Afterwards we had lunch at Liljevalchs’ new vegetarian restaurant. The food wasn’t bad but they were badly understaffed so we waited a long time for our food, only to find out that they had lost half of our order, so half of us had to re-order and wait again.