If you are a regular at auction exhibitions, which often show several hundred items, you know that there are never more than five and or at most ten pieces that are truly unique, whose quality stands out. These are the works we’re all on the lookout for. Our Ten by Ten series of exhibitions is an attempt to sort out everything but the special ten, the ones that stand out even in the context of a fantastic artistic career.

With Ten by Ten, we hope to share a special insight: the sheer joy of art, and how, at its best, it reaches for something as yet not understood. It runs its inquisitive fingers across terra incognito. Takes in the sensations, the new information, and processes them in a new work. It is a portal for the rest of us who lack this ability ourselves. This is the innermost spirit of art.

A subtle thematic continuity runs from Elsa Beskow’s beloved, empathic watercolours for a children’s book to Lucio Fontana’s dramatic cuts. Perhaps making a detour through Rodhe’s visions of a happy society. And why not connect Elsa Beskow to Jockum Nordström? In her “notes for letters”, Marie-Louise Ekman touches on memories of the past with unsentimental, matter-of-fact humour, achieving a sensitivity similar to that of Olle Olsson-Hagalund’s nostalgic depictions of Stockholm. Tarasewicz and Baertling look beyond language to show the world another way out. Ten works are quite enough. The Chosen.