Lotta Antonsson’s Collages Examine How the Female Body Is Desired

Layered with gemstones, crystals and seashells, the Swedish artist’s collages look at the commodification and objectification of the female body

Lotta Antonsson was introduced to collage as a child in the 1960s, scouring magazines her mother brought home from the hospital, where she worked nights as a nurse. “She didn’t have any kind of filter,” Antonsson says of her mother. “It was erotic magazines, hardcore news – I remember pictures of the Vietnam war – but also handcraft. And I think that’s where it all started: I have this love for printed matter.”

In I Am Everything, Antonsson takes those formative years and her personal archive of vintage images, collected between 1968 and 1978, as her starting point. Rather than reduced to photogenic objects, Antonsson’s subjects — usually young, “nude” and in repose — accrue layers. Gemstones, crystals and seashells are applied to their eyes, mouths and breasts in a bid to divert or return the male gaze. In works like Seashell Face #100 (2021), clam shells replace the model’s eyes, returning our gaze and confronting us as viewers. “A sea shell is a shelter for a living thing, but I don’t just want to protect these women and their identity, I also want to emphasise the way that they gaze back,” says Antonsson. In Ali (2024), pupils are replaced with fragments of milky quartz, which form insidious fang-like teeth. “When you’re at a distance, they really stare at you. It’s uncanny and you think: perhaps it’s not as beautiful as I thought it was.”

These works are presented on hot pink plinths and accompanied by mirrored surfaces, shell curtains and houseplants evoking the interior design of the 60s and her childhood. “I think I am treading a thin line when it comes to cliches, but I don’t want you to feel nostalgic”. Or if there is a nostalgia, it feels personal rather than collective. By resurfacing these images of sultry, doe-eyed models, Antonsson reminds us that the 60s were characterised by “free love” but also by the birth of pop culture, which, with the help of photography, contributed to the commodification of the female body. “Photography defined the objectification of women at that time,” Antonsson says, “when nude bodies were placed next to a car or a vinyl player, but had nothing to do with the commodity object.

After studying photography at art school, Antonsson returned to collage — demonstrative of 90s postmodernism, which adopted “low-brow” mediums like photography and video to critique mass media and commodity culture. “I was a kind of hardcore feministic punchliner in the 90s, with a more concrete, harder message,” but in the last 15 years, she says, the work has become more subtle. “I think about who’s behind me,” she says, referring to the likes of Eileen Agar and Hannah Höch who worked with found and appropriated images. “Dora Maar was super important to me,” she adds, which becomes clear in the interpolation of foreign objects into the picture. 

Growing up by the sea, Antonsson was “possessed by sea shells”, and 15 years ago, when she began making these works, “shells and organic matter did not have a place in contemporary art”. But Antonsson’s work reminds us that the shell is important to art history, and symbolic of Venus – the complex goddess of love and sex who was revered and objectified. “I want to lure you in with beauty,” she continues, “and then you find something that is compulsive, or confronting or scary.” In other works, Antonsson applies shimmering metal filings across the mouth like a gag, or over the eyes like a blindfold, turning what might otherwise be perceived as an act of violence into one of refusal. 

This refusal becomes explicit in her “active bodies” series, presented here as freestanding works in which her subjects assume yogic and active poses. Blown up to human scale, Jennifer (2021) was shot by an amateur and the only female photographer featured in the exhibition, revealing a woman with her back to the camera, feet positioned wide and legs angular, in a strident warrior pose. “When you look at that body, it’s about something else. I have been carrying this image around for so many years, because it’s geometric and has force. I wanted to emphasise this with a strong spine,” she says, pointing to the fine shells that form a vertical line down her back.

“I want to make something soft really hard, and hard soft,” Antonsson says of works like Other Ache (2021), where shells are crushed into an abrasive mask that covers the milky-white skin of the model, demonstrating the “exposure and vulnerability of being a young woman in a very male society, still.” In I Am Everything, Antonsson wields beauty not for beauty’s sake, but for its power to rupture, while physically rupturing the sheer plane of the photograph and the expectations of the medium. 

I Am Everything by Lotta Antonsson is on show at Fotografiska Stockholm until 29 November 2026.