The Gallery at The Marmara-Manhattan is pleased to welcome the Swedish artist Anders Knuttson, Ragna Berlin and Madeleine Hatz who live and work in New York. "Sweden a small nation with fewer than nine million inhabitants, the country is physically big and rich with such fundamental human rights as fresh air, clean water and vast areas of unspoiled natural scenery and nature is still something bigger than mankind. The changes of the seasons are dramatic: a short, intensive spring and summer season when the world famous northern light shines around the clock in the north, followed by a brilliantly colorful autumn, then by a long, dark frozen winter." Says Claes Britton in the articles titled "That's The Swedish Way".

Anders Knuttson was born and raised in Sweden and now lives in Brooklyn. The artist has regularly exhibited his paintings since 1972 and the success of his recent 1993 one-man exhibition in Seoul, South Korea reflect the international interest in his works. From 1969 to the early 1980's his work went through a simplification of the image and focus on the fundamental elements of painting. In 1980 Knuttson started to investigate and develop the possibilities of phosphorescent of self-luminous pigments in his paintings and very soon he knew that he wanted to work with phosphorescent material as a painter, visually -intuitively-with images- on flat surfaces. Knuttson's recent paintings of trees become forceful light in the dark besides being principal source of oxygen for all of us.

Ragna Berlin was educated as an architect and worked for six years with particular and interesting rooms and spaces. From this background she moved into art to research and develop her personal standpoint of what form, color and space can be. She has found a shape, a rounded organic form, which she has been working with since 1989. She is investigating this form in sculpture, installation, photography and painting. Patrick Amsellem described her painting as: " Berlin's paintings can be looked at from a strictly formal point of view, but the abstract compositions are also bearer of meaningful intimate communication. In their transcendental qualities the canvases recall a high modernist idiom, her own version of color field painting close to the mysterious sublime of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Apart from the similarities on the level of the sublime, there is also a strong sense of humor in Berlin's paintings, allowing for suggestive interpretations.

Madeleine Hatz was born in Sweden. She now lives and works in New York and considers herself "world nomad". She is inspired by the 11th Century Mystic Hildegard von Bingen whose vision was building a cosmic center, a new city with renewed persons who are the "stones" of the city. Hatz participated in a show in Holland titled " Public Interest" and she erected ruined brick walls in the city Hall Courtyard with convicts from Moroccan, Suriname and Friesian. For Hatz lying bricks and erecting walls is a metaphor for rebuilding our cultural human identity. Hatz action of building a brick wall each cast by hand by the artists in part of extensive body of work consisting of sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, photography and video. When she was interviewed on January 2001 "What does public interest mean to our development as an artist? She answered: "For many years I worked isolated in the Studio. I worked very intensely -I still do by the way- and I had a huge production which I destroyed a lot of it and I did not want to show it in the world outside the walls of the studio. At the moment I am in a stage where I am breaking the isolation. May be the broken/ruined walls in Leewarden also have to do with that, an image of freedom and breaking out. Now I want to bring the audience into the studio and the studio out to the audience."

All you need to do is to come and enjoy the winter's sonata in The Gallery at The Marmara-Manhattan.